12.16.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Microsoft Windows owned 91 percent of the PC operating system market in 2009, and IDC expects it to drop by 1 percent by 2014. Mac, which had 4 percent in 2009, is expected to increase to 5 percent by 2014. Linux is expected to hold steady at 4 percent.
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Give the Gift of Linux – The best thing you can do for your non-computer-savvy relative or friend is install Linux. Before you laugh, hear me out. Linux is great if all you’re doing is surfing the Internet and maybe writing some documents. Everything else, including photo sharing, is all cloud-based now anyway. Best of all, you won’t have to spend hours deleting junk out of the browser cache and you can do it all remotely via a VNC or an SSH connection. What more could you ask for?
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Many people only think about it from the fans perspective, without realizing the different steps it’s taken to get to them. ThistleWeb talks about the current copyright cartel thinking in how it affects musicians. The same people who claim to speak on behalf of artists, lobby to enshrine laws supposedly for the artists. He talks through the process of starting a band and how often these laws crop up forcing the next generation of musicians to spend a LOT of money to stay legal, or be criminalized. Staying legal means coughing up to maintain the status quo.
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Google
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Google’s new cloud computing ChromeOS looks like a plan “to push people into careless computing” by forcing them to store their data in the cloud rather than on machines directly under their control, warns Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the operating system GNU.
Two years ago Stallman, a computing veteran who is a strong advocate of free software via his Free Software Foundation, warned that making extensive use of cloud computing was “worse than stupidity” because it meant a loss of control of data.
Now he says he is increasingly concerned about the release by Google of its ChromeOS operating system, which is based on GNU/Linux and designed to store the minimum possible data locally. Instead it relies on a data connection to link to Google’s “cloud” of servers, which are at unknown locations, to store documents and other information.
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Kernel Space
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After Greg Kroah-Hartmann stopped maintaining 2.6.35-stable. I plan to maintain the 2.6.35 linux kernel tree longterm for now. Thanks to Greg for all his hard work on this.
The primary consumers of 2.6.35 right now are Meego and the CE Linux Forum, but some others are interested and everyone who wants a long term stable tree is of course free to use it.
The longterm tree continues after Greg’s 2.6.35.9 stable release. It will not be called “stable”, but called “longterm” to make the distinction clear.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Next up on the list is Googsystray, the tray-residing Google services notification app, which now boasts improved Calendar support, the addition of Tasks notifications and bugfixes.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Yesterday we talked about Frozenbyte wanting Linux gamers to help test their Linux game port of Trine. We also mentioned that Frozenbyte’s Trine 2 would likely be coming to Linux and that this work for Frozenbyte was being done by Alternative Games, a company we never heard of. We have now received an email from Tapio Honkonen, the CEO of this company that’s said to be all about Linux gaming.
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Wolfire’s first pay-what-you-want Humble Indie Bundle raised $1 million dollars in ten days, $180,000 of which customers earmarked for EFF.
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Heroes of Newerth, the multi-platform game where we gave away thousands of beta keys last year (more than any other web-site), has now reached version 2.0.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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In combination with the infinite canvas and the possibility to mirror the canvas, Krita makes sure artists get the best drawing experience.
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GNOME Desktop
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A bug submitted @ Launchpad points out that Gnome Shell might not be available in the official Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal repositories.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It seems the biggest problem that the project is facing is the lack of time. As this is a community driven project, it effectively takes a back seat to everything else that is going on in people’s lives. Personally, I do not know what can be done to change the situation. I too have limited time as well, but I do my best, as do many others involved in the project. Thank you to all those people. Your help is greatly appreciated.
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Flavours and Variants
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For this cycle, we discussed that the Ubuntu Artwork Team should do more for the community. The misconception that the team has anything to do with Ubuntu-the-product’s visual design and default theme has to die. I lean towards the same for the hope this could change.
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Following completion of its first major release in November, Linaro announces the expansion of its ecosystem to include Advisory Partners Canonical, GENIVI, HP, LiMo Foundation and MontaVista Software all of whom are involved in building complex Linux based software. The Advisors will help to guide the Linaro Technical Steering Committee (TSC) on critical industry needs, facilitating the alignment of requirements.
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Embedded systems, of course, are the great iceberg of software.
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Phones
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Android
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“Today, IBM is shipping Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.2.1. New in this release — the Notes Traveler client for Android OS,” wrote Ed Brill, IBM’s director of product management for Lotus software, in a blog post Tuesday.
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We’ve now open sourced the exact versions of Apache Hadoop we run in production at Facebook. These branches are based on the Apache Hadoop 0.20 release, but have a number of new features which haven’t yet made it into any official Hadoop release. Our engineering team contributes changes (such as the patches in these branches) upstream to the Hadoop project and you’ll find that we’ve listed JIRA tasks along with most of the changes.
Apache Hadoop is being used in three broad types of systems: as a warehouse for web analytics, as storage for a distributed database and for MySQL database backups.
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) today announced apache-extras.org, the Google-hosted site for code associated with Apache projects that are not part of the Foundation’s more than eighty Top-level Projects and dozens of initiatives in the Apache Incubator and Labs.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Come January 1st, however, I’m leaving to found a new company. Massive Health.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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It’s the holiday season, many people are buying gifts. Gifts for co-workers, friends, family and even strangers.
Recently I received a gift from a stranger — a copy of Blood Bowl for Windows. Based on the fantasy football board game of the same name, the gift may have seemed like a no-brainer for someone who doesn’t know you very well, and may be forced to buy a gift based on your apparent likes and dislikes from your posts on a forum or website. What was intended as an innocent gift from a well-wishing anonymous giver was actually an instrument of DRM. What kind of DRM, I don’t know, but that the game proudly announces online activation is an indication that there’s some.
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Project Releases
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The first release candidate of office-suite LibreOffice is now available to download.
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Openness/Sharing
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Wanting to “create and disseminate the knowledge of all and for all, from Cuba and with the world,” Cuba launches its own online encyclopedia, similar to Wikipedia, called EcuRed.
The site officially launches tomorrow, but it is already up and running with 19,345 entries, as first reported by Reuters.
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Open Data
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It is fantastic to see such interest in open government data from the European Commission, and we look forward to following further developments with great interest.
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Here is my opening keynote to the Open Government Data Camp held in London earlier this year (2010) on Nov 18th. Pasted below is the day two keynote by the always excellent Tom Steinberg of mysociety.org.
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Open Hardware
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The Cupcake CNC is an example of open hardware: the design, from its electronics to its physical build, is licensed in an open manner. Given its low cost and small size (compared to many commercial 3D printers), it is possible to introduce students to the marvels of modern manufacture on a budget, even in the classroom.
As a member of the Teaching Open Source community, I’ve watched the evolution of the POSSE programme as it reaches out to computer science faculty around the world. However, computer science graduates make up a very small percentage of the graduates of higher education, and I want to find ways for more students from more backgrounds to experience the benefits and rewards of communicating with and contributing to free and open source communities.
It is hard work, finding ways to introduce fundamentally non-technical students into open communities that assume, coming in the door, that you know how to use a version control system. While projects like OpenHatch are excellent, I find myself looking for more tangible ways to get students from outside computing involved in things they can see and feel.
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Less than two weeks after Google acquired on-demand video service Widevine, the search giant’s video property is said to be exploring a premium content acquisition of its own.
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In light of these findings, researchers concluded that a defense mechanism, which they labeled “backfire”, was preventing individuals from producing pure rational thought. The result is a self-delusion that appears so regularly in normal thinking that we fail to detect it in ourselves, and often in others: When faced with facts that do not fit seamlessly into our individual belief systems, our minds automatically reject (or backfire) the presented facts. The result of backfire is that we become even more entrenched in our beliefs, even if those beliefs are totally or partially false.
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” said Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher of the Michigan study. The occurrence of backfire, he noted, is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”
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Kosovo’s prime minister is the head of a “mafia-like” Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through eastern Europe, according to a Council of Europe inquiry report on organised crime.
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The European Commission has revised its rules for the assessment of co-operation agreements between competitors, so called horizontal co-operation agreements. As it is often vital for companies to work together to achieve synergies, there exist a vast number of horizontal co-operation agreements in many industries. The texts update and further clarify the application of competition rules in this area so that companies can better assess whether their co-operation agreements are in line with those rules. Modifications concern mainly the areas of standardisation, information exchange, and research and development (R&D).
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A judge who swore and stormed out of court after being convicted of failing to keep her German Shepherd under control has been fined £2,500.
The dog, owned by Judge Beatrice Bolton who sits at Newcastle Crown Court, attacked a sunbathing student in his parents’ Northumberland garden.
Bolton, 57, who was asked during the trial to stop chewing gum, denied one charge under the Dangerous Dogs Act.
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Science
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There’s something exciting afoot in the world of cosmology. Last month, Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford and Vahe Gurzadyan at Yerevan State University in Armenia announced that they had found patterns of concentric circles in the cosmic microwave background, the echo of the Big Bang.
This, they say, is exactly what you’d expect if the universe were eternally cyclical. By that, they mean that each cycle ends with a big bang that starts the next cycle. In this model, the universe is a kind of cosmic Russian Doll, with all previous universes contained within the current one.
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THE natural and social sciences exert a huge influence on the ways our societies develop. At present most of the funding for scientific research is controlled by the state and the private economy. Perhaps it is time to look at their track record and consider an alternative.
In economics, we already have damning evidence that the funding system isn’t working. As the investment banker turned financial reformer Philip Augar has pointed out, over a period of 30 years the discipline became a servant of the financial sector. “Finance wrapped its tentacles around the relevant parts of the academic world… it is little wonder that so much academic research was supportive of the financial system.”
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New software developed by ESA makes available online to everyone, everywhere at anytime, the entire library of images from the SOHO solar and heliospheric observatory. Just download the viewer and begin exploring the Sun.
JHelioviewer is new visualization software that enables everyone to explore the Sun. Developed as part of the ESA/NASA Helioviewer Project, it provides a desktop program that enables users to call up images of the Sun from the past 15 years.
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This could be useful for people who are paralysed, and are unable to control parts of their body enough to physically activate the joystick of an electric wheelchair. Many people may be able to use this technology to gain some independence, and to take a break from needing an attendant to push their wheelchair so they can get some fresh air.
The parts of this system include an electric wheelchair, a laptop computer, an Arduino, an interface circuit, an EEG headset, and a collection of ready-made and custom software.
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Health/Nutrition
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Channel 4 News Correspondent Sarah Smith reports from the US where people are being told that a massive budget deficit mean they have to find the money themselves for life-saving operations.
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Security
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The most popular password among nearly 400,000 exposed by the Gawker hack was “12345,” according to an analysis done by a security firm.
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The website-attacking group “Anonymous” tried and failed to take down Amazon.com on Thursday. The group’s vengeance horde quickly found out something techies have known for years: Amazon, which has built one of the world’s most invincible websites, is almost impossible to crash.
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Email is just not trustworthy and so telling users to find their own way to LinkedIn and to go through a normal LinkedIn login process is absolutely the best way to handle this kind of request.
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This month’s online struggles between Wikileaks supporters participating in the ephemeral group called Anonymous and international corporations like Visa, Mastercard and PayPal, who have stopped allowing their customers to donate money to Wikileaks, have brought electronic disruptions like Distributed Denials of Service (DDOS) to the forefront of peoples’ minds all over the world.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Pointing to the Cameron government’s growing impatience over student protests, British officials have reportedly moved against 12-year-old Nicky Wishart, henceforth known as the Notorious Nicky of Oxfordshire, threatening him with arrest for threatening the public peace.
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The Foreign Office was planning for the possibility that Britain might attack Iraq without UN approval more than six months before the invasion, according to a hitherto classified document written shortly before a meeting between Tony Blair and George Bush at Camp David.
The document, drawn up by John Williams, press adviser to the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, spells out ways to soften up the media, including “critics like the Guardian”. Under the heading Not taking the UN route, Williams wrote: “Our argument should be narrow, and put with vigour – Iraq is uniquely dangerous.”
His memo, titled Iraq Media Strategy, is dated 4 September 2002, when the government was still trying to get UN support for military action and when Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, was advising that clear UN authority was needed. The document was also written as Whitehall and MI6 were being wound up by No 10 to provide much-needed ammunition for the government’s Iraq weapons dossier.
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Declassified CIA files reveal that U.S. intelligence officials went to great lengths to protect a Ukrainian fascist leader and suspected Nazi collaborator from prosecution after World War II and set him up in a New York office to wage covert war against the Soviet Union, according to a new report to Congress.
Mykola Lebed led an underground movement to undermine the Kremlin and conduct guerrilla operations for the CIA during the Cold War, says the report, prepared by two scholars under the supervision of the National Archives. It was given to Congress on Thursday and posted online.
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The Metropolitan police have moved to close off the supply of information which could identify senior journalists at the News of the World who commissioned illegal phone hacking.
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In Western democracies, we may well work under the belief that the state is legitimate, but we surely don’t operate under the view that everything it does is legitimate. That is our job — isn’t it? — to find and expose its illegitimate acts.
I do not think I can accept as journalistic canon the idea that reporters and editors in every nation should view their states as legitimate. To the contrary, we root for them to challenge the legitimacy of illegitimate states; don’t we expect them to be the first, best hammer on the walls of secrecy built by the tyrannical and the corrupt?
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Douglas Zerby, 35, was shot and killed by officers responding to a 911 call of an intoxicated man holding a ‘six-shooter’ Sunday in the Belmont Shore neighborhood.
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Expensive, realistic masks — the kind that are the hit of the costume party — are increasingly being used out of season, and not always for laughs.
A white bank robber in Ohio recently used a “hyper-realistic” mask manufactured by a small Van Nuys company to disguise himself as a black man, prompting police there to mistakenly arrest an African American man for the crimes.
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The Conservatives touted ‘high-quality opportunities’ bound for Canada’s aerospace industry as a result of the JSF deal. Exactly how much work? It all depends who you ask.
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In the aftermath of the G20 fiasco here last summer, one thing Torontonians agreed on was that such summits should be held in isolated venues — on military bases, on ocean-going vessels, on melting glaciers — anywhere but where lots of people reside.
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About 30 Sudanese women have been arrested for holding a protest march over a video which allegedly shows two policemen whipping a woman.
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Cablegate
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Lovers necessarily keep or share secrets. Being in a healthy relationship means achieving a certain level of intimacy, where shared knowledge of each others’ weaknesses and insecurities is protected by a bond of mutual trust. Sometimes lovers might do devilish things that outsiders wouldn’t understand, or shouldn’t be privy to, and this is fine. But by and large, what they do is simply no one else’s business.
But imagine that the man in the relationship kept it a secret that he had other women on the side, kids, a criminal record, venereal disease, and basically betrayed his lover in every way imaginable, unbeknownst to her?
Now imagine a third party felt it was their moral duty to reveal it?
No one questions that governments must maintain a certain level of secrecy, including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who told Time that “Secrecy is important for many things … [but it] shouldn’t be used to cover up abuses.” The entire premise of Assange’s whistleblower organization is this: To what degree is government secrecy justified? And when particular secrets could be damaging to the other partner in the United States government’s relationship — the American people — should these secrets be revealed in the name of protecting the public?
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Senior US officials urged British banking regulators two years ago to take more draconian action against Iranian banks suspected of financing nuclear and missile programmes, US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks show.
Hector Sants, chief executive of the Financial Services Authority, was forced to defend the regulator’s record on Iran – particularly with regard to Bank Sepah – to the state department under-secretary Reuben Jeffrey and the US treasury assistant Patrick O’Brien.
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WikiLeaks supporters wear masks of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Guy Fawkes masks emblematic of “Anonymous” during a demonstration calling for the release of Assange from prison.
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WikiLeaks has released its first confidential cable written by diplomats from the U.S. mission to the United Nations. While the December 2009 cable — which discusses U.S. efforts on a range of issues before the U.N. General Assembly — provides no major news revelations, it contains some valuable insights into the way America conducts its business here.
The confidential U.S. diplomatic communication — which was approved by U.S. ambassador Susan E. Rice — shows how reliant the U.S. is on its allies, particularly in Europe, to take the lead on politically sensitive issues like the promotion of human rights, where the U.S. often faces criticism for its military and detention policies. The cable credits the European Union with “collaborating pragmatically” with the Obama administration on its top priorities, including efforts to require emerging economic powers to pay a larger share of the U.N.’s administrative and peacekeeping costs, and to adopt U.N. resolutions criticizing the human rights record of Burma, Iran, and North Korea.
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Judging by the last two weeks, being an enemy of Julian Assange is only marginally less stressful than being Julian Assange. Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa, which all moved to cut ties with Assange’s WikiLeaks after the site’s release of diplomatic cables, have been the targets of distributed denial-of-service attacks from a group that calls itself “Anonymous.” There is nothing fancy going on here. DDoS attacks simply aim to send more traffic to a target site than it can handle, slowing it down or making it temporarily unavailable.
Many prominent Internet personalities, including John Perry Barlow and Cory Doctorow, have spoken out against DDoS on the sensible-sounding grounds that one can’t fight for free speech by limiting it for others. How, then, does Anonymous defend its actions? In a press release (PDF), the self-described “Internet gathering” explains that its “goal is to raise awareness about WikiLeaks and the underhanded methods employed by … companies to impair WikiLeaks’ ability to function.” For this author, however, the most interesting bit of the press release comes in the next paragraph: “[A DDoS attack] is a symbolic action—as blogger and academic Evgeny Morozov put it, a legitimate expression of dissent” (italics theirs).
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The founder of WikiLeaks has issued a plea from jail for his supporters to keep fighting, accusing Visa, Mastercard and Paypal of being instruments of US foreign policy.
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JULIA Gillard is confronting a growing backlash within her own party, with more Labor MPs yesterday attacking the Prime Minister’s language and declaring their support for WikiLeaks’s founder Julian Assange and free speech.
Ms Gillard said the latest WikiLeaks information dump was based on an illegal act, but Canberra has since insisted that was a reference to the original theft of the material by a junior US serviceman rather than any action by Mr Assange.
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A bloke named Alex Tapanaris, whose name appeared on the PDF press release circulated by online trouble-makers Anonymous has had his web site disappeared from the web and, according to a post on pastebin.com, the unfortunate chap has been arrested.
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The leaking of confidential documents by whistle-blower WikiLeaks is a case of information terrorism, Hungarian parliamentary speaker Laszlo Kover said late on Sunday.
Kover, who was minister without a portfolio overseeing the secret services between 1998 and 2000, said the WikiLeaks affair shows that “it is necessary to tackle” the taboo that surrounds the lack of control in online news reporting and “it is necessary to devise a method to prevent similar cases in the future.”
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“We now know that Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and others are instruments of U.S. foreign policy. It’s not something we knew before,” he charged in the statement provided by his mother. “I am calling for the world to protect my work and my people from these illegal and immoral attacks.”
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WikiLeaks protesters have marched to Martin Place, sparking several violent clashes with police.
The crowd overwhelmingly voted to march despite being told they were not allowed by police.
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By any standard, these and other calls for Assange’s death constitute incitements to murder as much as Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa did. The question is whether such speech is protected under the First Amendment. I personally believe that all speech is protected—when it is speech. Julian Assange has the right to publish documents, as do the newspapers with which he shared the them. Salman Rushdie has the right to offend those who read The Satanic Verses—even to offend the many who haven’t read a word of it. In theory, Sarah Palin, Mike Flanagan, and Bob Beckel have the right to say what they think about Julian Assange.
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Mark told me that Julian Assange is currently in the very same cell that was occupied by Oscar Wilde before the latter’s transfer to Reading Gaol. His client is not allowed to have any internet access, and nor has the library trolley come round. He is being kept in isolation, even though he is a model prisoner. He did have access to a television but this has now been removed (though he loathed having to watch British daytime television). All he has now is a wind-up radio.
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How do I know that Interpol, Britain and Sweden’s treatment of Julian Assange is a form of theater? Because I know what happens in rape accusations against men that don’t involve the embarrassing of powerful governments.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is in solitary confinement in Wandsworth prison in advance of questioning on state charges of sexual molestation. Lots of people have opinions about the charges. But I increasingly believe that only those of us who have spent years working with rape and sexual assault survivors worldwide, and know the standard legal response to sex crime accusations, fully understand what a travesty this situation is against those who have to live through how sex crime charges are ordinarily handled — and what a deep, even nauseating insult this situation is to survivors of rape and sexual assault worldwide.
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# WikiLeaks boss will remain in jail ahead of appeal by Swedish prosecutors
# Appeal will be heard within 48 hours by senior High Court judge
# Assange desperately trying to raise £200,000 cash to meet bail security
# His lawyer says ‘The begging bowl is out’
# Michael Moore, Bianca Jagger and Jemima Khan show their support
# Judge allows live ‘Twitters’ from court
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Oh, goody. Perhaps upset that his last film, Capitalism, was a dud and he hasn’t been in the news for a while, filmmaker Michael Moore is now offering to post bail for WikiLeaks frontman Julian Assange, who is currently languishing in a British prison while the Brits work out his extradition to Sweden, where he’s wanted for questioning.
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Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.
Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
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Here is a very interesting document titled “Criminal Prohibitions on the Publication of Classified Defense Information” by Jennifer K. Elsea, Legislative Attorney from October 18, 2010. It gives you insight into how the US is struggling to find ways to prosecute Julian Assange for leaking documents.
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It’s helping us all understand that the Internet isn’t just for tweeting what you had for lunch, watching (and making) viral YouTube videos, sharing family pictures on Facebook and buying stuff on Amazon.
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Yet again, I’m left noticing the similarities between the US government’s reaction to Wikileaks and the entertainment industry’s reaction to file sharing”, says Mike Masnick (right) on TechDirt.
“Each move that it made, including going legal, backfired in a big, bad way. It’s really quite stunning to watch the US government make the same mistakes.”
Stunning, but hardly surprising, particularly when one considers just how close the Obama administration is to the corporate entertainment industry, and how frequently Big 4 record label and Hollywood demands end up as US government policy.
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Amazingly, the Obama administration is surpassing its predecessor when it comes to assaults on whistle-blowing and a free press. As Politico’s Josh Gerstein reported, “President Barack Obama’s Justice Department has taken a hard line against leakers. . . .’They’re going after this at every opportunity and with unmatched vigor,’ said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.” The New York Times similarly documented: “the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks.” The Obama DOJ has launched nothing less than a full-on war against whistleblowers; its magnanimous “Look Forward, Not Backward” decree used to shield high-level Bush criminals from investigations is manifestly tossed to the side when it comes to those who reveal such criminality. And they even revitalized an abandoned Bush-era subpoena issued to The New York Times’ James Risen, demanding that he disclose his source for an article in which he revealed an embarrassingly botched attempt to infiltrate and sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
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I find it fascinating how US government has chosen to try to dismantle the support network that makes wikileaks possible – pressuring paypal, amazon and numerous others into refusing to enable wikileaks to work.
They have pressured pretty much every stakeholder with one exception. The traditional media.
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The Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, was so concerned about the health of the world’s banks in March 2008 that he plotted a secret bailout of the system using funds from cash-rich nations, according to a US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks.
Six months before the world financial crisis reached its peak, forcing taxpayers to rescue collapsing financial institutions, King told US officials in London that the UK, US, Switzerland and Japan could jointly enable a multibillion-pound cash injection into global banks, overriding the “dysfunctional” G7 nations.
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I have a legal question about the Wikileaks case, prompted by this this Guardian piece, by John Naughton, linked in Henry’s comments. I must confess: I wasn’t surprised or particularly scandalized when Amazon kicked Wikileaks off its cloud, because I figured Amazon was probably technically in the right. Wikileaks had probably violated whatever terms of service were in place. I thought this sounded like the sort of thing any private company was likely to do, whether or not Joe Lieberman actually brought pressure to bear. If you have a problem customer who has violated your terms of service, you terminate service. (Just to be clear: I think ongoing attempts to shut down Wikileaks in patently legally dodgy ways are an utter scandal. Joe Lieberman pressuring Amazon is a scandal. I’m with Glenn Greenwald. I also think existing intellectual property laws are, by and large, an atrocious mess. Still, the law is what it is, so the question of how a private company like Amazon can and should be expected to react to this sort of situation is narrower than certain other more general questions about free speech and the press and so forth.)
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The magazine said it decided to feature the Australian whistle-blower on its front cover because although he is not a musician, he “is the person who best embodied a rock’n’roll behaviour” during 2010.
He is portrayed bare-chested and bathed in a mysterious white light in front of a bank of television screens.
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The division in Crowley’s mind between Bad Wikileaks and Responsible New York Times is entirely arbitrary. Each is a publisher; each routinely takes advantage of stolen goods and information. That one does so with an agenda that’s free for all to see and the other pretends it’s a disinterested observer makes no difference at all.
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Howard Riddle, the Chief Magistrate, agreed that reporters could send the short messages, known as “Tweets” as long as they did so “quietly” and “did not disturb” the court.
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Okay, this post is going to take the extreme cynical view, which I don’t believe is true, but since it’s being suggested, we might as well flesh it out. In my post about how the US government’s response to Wikileaks has caused more harm than anything actually in the leaks so far, one of the commenters pointed to a Larry Lessig talk from a few years back, where he mentioned a conversation with Richard Clarke — the former anti-terrorism government official, who, more recently, has been selling his book on “Cyberwar” — where he said that the US government has had an “iPatriot Act” sitting in a drawer, ready to go at a moment’s notice whenever there was “an i-9/11 event.”
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A dramatic day in and around City of Westminster magistrates court saw Assange win bail, but then be forced to return to what his lawyer Mark Stephens described as “Dickensian conditions” at Wandsworth prison while the international legal battle played out.
Sweden has decided to contest the granting of bail to Assange, who is being held pending an extradition hearing, on the grounds that no conditions imposed by a judge could guarantee that he would not flee, a legal source told the Guardian.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Colorado beekeeper Tom Theobald never expected to become embroiled in a controversy between the EPA and the pesticide industry. But that’s exactly what happened when Theobald got hold of an EPA document revealing that the agency is allowing the widespread use of a bee-toxic pesticide, in spite of warnings from EPA scientists.
So how did Theobald (pictured above) end up with such a contentious document?
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Finance
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European regulators are set to tether banker bonuses to the level of basic salaries in a move that could deal the most severe blow yet to the culture of multi-million pound pay-outs.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Office of Fair Trading has fired a shot across the bows of marketing companies that buy blog posts and tweets for sponsored promotions without disclosing the fact, after finding that a London-based company broke its code on disclosure.
But it declined to say whether it will be going after other companies in the next few months, despite the insistence of Handpicked Media, an 18-month-old startup based in Carnaby Street which the OFT censured on Monday, that the practice is widespread.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its amicus brief, the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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I think one of the problems that people have in discussing DRM is that they only look at one type of error, and never bother to compare the two. As a result of that, those who support strong DRM tend to focus only on the “error” of letting people get a “free ride,” and ignore all of the collateral damage, as Phipps explains. Yet, when you compare the two, it’s difficult to see how one can argue that the “free ride” problem is worse than the problem of collateral damage from limiting legitimate uses. And that is why so many people have such problems with DRM. It’s not that we want a “free ride.” It’s that we worry about the costs associated with all of those collateral damage points.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Today USTR provided some additional insight into negotiations of a regional, Asia-Pacific trade agreement, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement. The USTR web page on the TPP negotiations is http://www.ustry.gov/tpp. At present, the TPP negotiators include Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Japan and Canada have expressed interest in joining the negotiations, and USTR clearly would like to design an agreement that will be open to other countries. Our discussions focused on the intellectual property chapter in the agreement. According to USTR, the only text that has been tabled for the IP chapter concerns trademarks and general provisions — the patents, copyrights, test data and enforcement sections of the IP chapter are being designed now. USTR expects a number of health related issues to be raised in the upcoming Santiago Chile meeting in February 2011.
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The Supreme Court on Monday said Costco could be liable for copyright infringement for selling foreign-made watches without the manufacturer’s authorization.
True – the Court split 4 to 4 and offered no reasoning for the vote, which technically means that no legal precedent by the high court is created. But on a practical level, it leaves in place the lower court’s opinion which said that copyright law prevents Costco from re-selling foreign-made watches that it lawfully purchased.
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Copyrights
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It’s amusing to see defenders of current copyright law often making final declarations about how copyright is a “right” for artists, and thus protecting those rights absolutely makes sense. What they never seem to talk about is how, at the same time, copyright quite frequently is removing rights from the public. Julian Sanchez points us to a fascinating new paper from law professor John Tehranian, which tries to bring user rights back into the discussion of copyright
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A government advisory panel on Monday basically approved a plan to tolerate the unlicensed use of copyrighted works unless the use unduly infringes on the interest of the copyright holder, government officials said.
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ACTA
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The report includes a detailed discussion of ACTA-like agreements that emphasize cooperation, information sharing, and enforcement activities. It notes what should be obvious to many participating countries, including Canada – “most of the benefits to IP rights holders from measures to promote adherence to existing rules in partner countries can be expected to accrue to third parties, such as rights holders in the United States.”
A Mother’s Plea: WikiLeaks Founder No Criminal
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.14.10
Posted in News Roundup at 11:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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That curiosity is bent toward very low-end computers though, and it’s not enough to me to just show a pretty desktop at 150Mhz if the overall experience feels like your head is being pressed through a bowl of mashed potatoes.
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In the past 45 days, I’ve done a ton of installs. Of that bunch, 17 of our clients in that 45 days had chosen AT&T DSL for their provider.
For good reason I think…
They offer a two year contract at 14.95 a month for Internet service.
Pretty good deal, huh?
Not if you are a Linux User.
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Server
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SBS has been released with prices for the standard version including $72 CALs and a higher price and $96 CALs for the chocolate-icing version. We are not locked into M$ where I work so we can save a ton of money running Debian GNU/Linux on our ancient servers. Why would any organization pay a voluntary tax to M$ for the privilege of using the organization’s hardware? It beats me…
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Kernel Space
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Recently, I have spent some time reviewing Linux kernels from a storage perspective; starting with 2.6.30 (actually going back into the 2.6.2x series) and ending with the 2.6.34 kernel. That article was published on June 8 of this year – just a short time ago. In the meantime, the pace of kernel development has continued and as of the writing of this article the merge window for the 2.6.37 kernel has just closed signaling the beginning of the great bug hunt before the release of the 2.6.37 kernel. So now seems like a good time to go over the 2.6.35 and 2.6.36 kernels to review what changes have happened that affect the Linux storage world.
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The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) announced that their 2010 training partner program is up 10 percent from this time last year.
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Graphics Stack
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AMD’s Toronto developers working on the ATI Catalyst Linux driver have just released their last public update of the year. The Catalyst 10.12 Linux driver (along with the Windows version) is now available for those interested in this high-performance, but proprietary, driver.
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Applications
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Nothing beats the traditional methods of note taking, a simple pen and paper. Nowadays it’s very common for many of us to use an application such as notepad, Evernote or some other note taking tool to jot down and organize our thoughts and work.
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I am not just singling out FocusWriter as a target, only to use it as an example.of some typical confused good intentions. In my experience, when someone tries to write software for writers — whether a dedicated editor like FocusWriter or a more elaborate planner like StorYBook or Writer’s World Maker, they usually seem to refer to what wannabe writers would like, instead of what might actually help a beginning or established writer.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Becoming PCI complaint can be a daunting task, and its certainly not something that can happen overnight. We figure the time line for this will generally be about 10 days at the
fastest. We will be going over a road map of how you can accomplish this, and what you can expect along the way. Covering everything from getting your server PCI compliant, some of the software and open source Linux tools you can use to help with this. As well as getting scanned by a PCI approved scanning vendor.
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Wine
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For those Linux users that need or want to run Windows applications in LInux, here is some good news for you.
Wine 1.3.9 is now out, providing new stability and compatibility options. At the top of the list of new features in Wine (WINE is not an emulator) is the beginning of new ActiveX support in the browser.
Moving beyond ActiveX are a long list of fixes for Windows games that will now work on Linux.
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Games
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Linux is not championed as a viable gaming platform in many communities, in part because of its smaller user base and the relatively low number of commercially supported native Linux games that are released each year. However, there are a number of encouraging developments on this front. For example, the Unigine engine should enable developers to produce high-quality 3D games with up-to-date visuals and advanced rendering. One title to be released using this engine is OilRush. This eagerly awaited title fuses a classical real time strategy with a Tower Wars genre.
Notwithstanding these developments, Linux has an ever-expanding library of tens of thousands of free games, many of which are released under an open source license. A good proportion of these titles are entertaining, highly addictive, offer captivating gameplay, and are challenging.
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DarkPlaces is based on the Quake 3 engine or “id Tech 3″ — id Tech 4 hasn’t been “open-sourced” yet, it is planned to be released under the GNU GPL in 2011. DarkPlaces has graphics on par with id Tech 4, mainly because they essentially rewrote all of id Software’s improvements to the engine, making an engine very similar to id Tech 4 if not superior.
[...]
All these great game engines are not used to the fullest potential, they are used mainly by the developers for the developer’s own games, even though the game engines allow for a magnitude of different playing styles.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Since we were quite busy in the last weeks, here comes a report about the last month in Amarok. The main reason for this delay is the following:
We released Amarok 2.4 beta !
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The primary goal of this port is to improve significantly the integration of Gtk/Gnome applications in KDE. However, we also aim to provide Oxygen as a modern, professional and polished theme for other desktop environments, that works seamlessly without having KDE even installed.
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GNOME Desktop
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The annual report is a summary of GNOME community activities in 2009. It includes a review of the year, accounts of various community activities and events around the world, an interview with the GNOME Release team, and GNOME Foundation development actions during the year.
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Top 5 GNOME themes are listed here. Once you have downloaded the file rightclick at desktop and click on Change Desktop Background Option.
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Zorin OS is an Ubuntu-based distribution, which its developers say is, “designed specifically for Linux beginners who want to have easy and smooth access to open source software.” Well, isn’t that similar to what Ubuntu says? Why would anyone need anything easier than Ubuntu? Is it even possible to have anything easier than Ubuntu? Well, Zorin folks think so, but let’s see.
[...]
In summary, Linux is Linux is Linux. Sticking an XP-like menu in there doesn’t change that. I’m not sure we should try.
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Gentoo is one of the most talked and noted Linux distributions that have been in active development stage for last 6-7 years. Although there are only a limited number of followers for Gentoo when compared with some other distributions such as Ubuntu, Gentoo has been delivering a best Linux distribution suited for power users. Let’s have a look at the nature of Gentoo first.
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New Releases
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Debian Family
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P.S. I took a look at the new Debian Squeeze Plymouth theme whilst I was playing around, it is the mutt’s nuts! Squeeze is shaping up very nicely.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Do you wanna know why Ubuntu-isms suck? Because they make software non-portable. I have just spend a few hours to try to get Synapse, an alternative to the stagnant and buggy Gnome-Do, into my Gentoo Overlay.
I knew that I had to package Zeitgeist and a few other packages but I was ready for it, I thought: “How bad could it be?”. It could be bad.
With many devs only developing on Canonical’s GNOME fork every other distribution that might be running on a more vanilla GNOME is fucked. You want a launcher to start programs? Be ready to pull in Canonical’s weird indicator-library that is a systray, but just not a systray. Then there’s this helper library, and that helper toolkit, all hosted on Launchpad, no information on how to build it apart from (get it from our PPA or the current Ubuntu version) and all heavily depending on each other.
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Ubuntu’s Maverick Desktop edition was, to me, a great success. It’s fast, secure, and slick. Linux-Mint Julia, the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution was, however, a total success. Julia surpassed Maverick in ease of installation and use.
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Flavours and Variants
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Pros: Plasma interface offers plenty of eye-candy, simple installation process, and an excellent selection of pre-installed applications
Cons: Unfamiliar default browser, old-fashioned software installation GUI, and several areas such as Activities are still poorly documented
Canonical’s Ubuntu is one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions around, but it’s easy to forget that there is a wealth of alternatives built on the same user-friendly base – including, most famously, the KDE-based Kubuntu. While the back end of the OS is identical in both cases, the interface couldn’t be more different.
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Sub-notebooks
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One of the great ironies of this year is that Google and Oracle – now owner of Sun and Java – are locked in legal combat. The irony stems from the fact that, even as they bicker, the concept they did more than anyone else to create is back in the limelight. This is what we used to call the thin client, which then morphed into the netbook and now the cloudbook.
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Thanks to Glyn Moody, a UK-based technology journalist, I’ve just learned that Netflix is not only using, but also contributing, to numerous open-source projects. They’re in good company.
As Kevin McEntee, Netflix’s VP of Systems & ECommerce Engineering explained on a recent blog posting, Why we use and contribute to open source software, “Our budget, measured in dollars, time, people, and energy, is limited and we must therefore focus our technology development efforts on that streaming video software that clearly differentiates Netflix and creates delight for our customers. These limits require that we stand on the shoulders of giants who have solved technology challenges shared in common by all companies that operate at Internet scale. I’m really just articulating the classical build vs. buy trade off that everyone deals with when developing software.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Despite Apple’s best efforts to make it go away, the Web is still littered with Flash-based sites and content. The lack of an open source alternative to Adobe’s Flash player is still a major pain point for Linux users and vendors, and the proprietary player is a big source of bug reports for Mozilla. Which brings the question: Why hasn’t Mozilla backed one of the projects to create an open source player?
A bit ago I was having a conversation over email with Nathan Willis about some of the open source alternatives like GNU Gnash and Lightspark, and the question came up – why doesn’t Mozilla back these?
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RockMelt was released in beta in November with the claim that it would bring social networking into the browser. But Flock has been a social networking oriented browser for years now and a new version shows where Flock has several advantages over RockMelt.
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Oracle
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I believe it is high-time that Apache and Google created a new, Java-like programming language, platform and VM which can easily accomodate the ports of the Java base libraries, all of the Apache developed Java libraries/applications and the typical, popular open-source libraries like Hibernate.
Java should start off on the same road as LibreOffice under a different name.
The new “Java” language should be sufficiently close to Java that a one-to-one source converter tool can be written for trivial porting of Java libraries. Apache Harmony is a good basis for this but Snoracle patents will have to be worked around.
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BSD
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The first of the test builds for the FreeBSD 8.2/7.4 Release Cycle is now available for amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. Files suitable for creating installation media or doing FTP based installs through the network should be on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.
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I have received a mail regarding the early development of the OpenBSD IPSEC stack. It is alleged that some ex-developers (and the company they worked for) accepted US government money to put backdoors into our network stack, in particular the IPSEC stack. Around 2000-2001.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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A monthly look at updates and new releases in the GNU operating system.
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Government
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The Italian region Puglia will make the use of open source software and open standards mandatory for its public administrations. A law, adopted on 2 December by the regional administration, instructs regional and local public administrations to use open formats for the electronic disseminations of documents, and wherever possible use free and open source software.
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Openness/Sharing
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My DVD set for the Blender Foundation’s latest open movie, “Sintel,” arrived this month. Considering the size, expense, and duration of the production, it’s a truly amazing short film. There’s much more emotional weight here than in “Elephants Dream” or “Big Buck Bunny.” More of interest here, though, is the huge amount of supplementary material included in the set. This is more than just the sources for the movie. There’s also a lot of tutorial information for Blender users and of course, an array of personal commentaries on the production process.
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Known as Google Message Continuity, the service replicates all your Microsoft Exchange data on Google’s servers. If your Exchange servers crash or you take them down for maintenance, your employees can open up a browser and switch to Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts. The service is based on technology from Postini, the business email outfit Google purchase in 2007.
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There’s a rather incredible story over in the Baltimore Sun about the extent Abbott Laboratories’ execs went to in their effort to sell more of their heart stents. This is not a unique story, but every time I see a similar story, it serves as a reminder of the problems of putting “healthcare” in the hands of companies who have every incentive to sell you snake oil — especially when that snake oil is patented and they can charge ridiculous monopoly rents for it.
The story involves a heart stent sold by Abbott. Apparently, Abbott cultivated a few doctors and plied them with all sorts of… well… most people would probably refer to them as bribes… to implant more stents. The article focuses on one Dr. Mark Midei, who “set a record” by implanting 30 stents in one day. That would be great if those stents saved lives. Problem is… a study earlier this year showed that stents were no better than drugs for many patients. Now, in some cases, they can certainly be helpful, but there was little indication that Midei made much of an effort to see if the over 2,000 stents he was implanting per year were really necessary.
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RUPERT MURDOCH’S The News of the World will not be charged for hacking into the phones of high profile people after a prosecutor said that there was not enough evidence.
The News of the Screws was treated to a dose of dirt flying in its direction when it was accused of hacking into the mobile phone accounts of a number of people, including some royals and an MP. That was corroborated by an ex-employee in an interview with the New York Times and was discussed at length – with some apparent evidence mentioned- in the Guardian newspaper.
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Science
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NanoSail-D ejected from the Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite, FASTSAT, demonstrating the capability to deploy a small cubesat payload from an autonomous microsatellite in space.
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Bones from two dinosaur specimens have prompted a federal lawsuit in a dispute between two organizations that preserve fossils.
The Fort Collins Coloradoan reported a South Dakota research company is suing a Montana nonprofit dedicated to the study of fossils over castings of bones from two tyrannosaurus-rex specimens discovered in South Dakota.
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Security
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A Colorado sheriff’s online database mistakenly revealed the identities of confidential drug informants and listed phone numbers, addresses and Social Security numbers of suspects, victims and others interviewed during criminal investigations, authorities said.
The breach potentially affects some 200,000 people, and Mesa County sheriff’s deputies have been sifting through the database to determine who, if anyone, is in jeopardy.
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RONALD MCDONALD was left with more than just paint on his face after McDonalds revealed the theft of customer data.
McDonalds claims it has served more than 99 billion hamburgers, but on Friday admitted to serving up something entirely different, customers’ personal information. Realising it’s not quite the usual side order of fries most punters ask for, McDonalds was quick to rustle up a question and answers website to try to calm its patrons. Except like its food, the website threw up more questions than answers.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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visual77 alerts us to the news of a guy arrested in Baltimore for a bomb plot. As you dig into the details, though, it looks quite similar to the case in Portland, where it appears that the entire “plot” was created with the help of the FBI.
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Cablegate
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WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange’s lawyer said he has seen secret police documents that prove the whistle-blower is innocent of sex assault claims made against him by two women.
Lawyer Bjorn Hurtig, representing Mr Assange in Sweden where the charges were laid, said the papers reveal both women had “hidden agendas” and lied about being coerced into having sex.
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Icelandic IT company Datacell today said it will take legal action against Visa Europe and Mastercard in light of both companies decisions to cease processing payments associated with the WikiLeaks website.
Datacell said they will use legal mechanisms to try to force the card companies to resume accepting WikiLeaks payments immediately.
Datacell’s CEO Andreas Fink said that Visa should ‘just simply do their business where they are good at – transferring money’.
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Again, I’m struck by the simple split many have here: it really is an argument between those who believe in distributed and open vs. centralized and closed — and I’m still not sure if the folks supporting centralized and closed even realize this. Their response, to date, has been to act as if they’re fighting a centralized system. They focus on things like Wikileaks’ domain and its founder — as if that’s the issue. They target the centralized pieces. And even if you make the argument that Wikileaks needs Julian Assange to stay together, if it were to shut down, it wouldn’t take long for a ton of other, similar offerings to spring up in its place. And, they would probably be even more effective (and potentially more damaging).
While I don’t necessarily like “war” analogies, what we’re seeing is very much a battle between the way people want to see information flow, and one side seems to be still fighting the last war.
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Insufficient resources, lack of training for investigators and a variety of other problems have plagued the Defense Department system intended to investigate allegations of retaliation against military whistleblowers, according to a recently disclosed government report. At the same time, the number of military whistleblower retaliation allegations has “more than doubled” from fewer than 300 in 1997 to nearly 600 in 2007, according to the report.
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Dutch police announced Thursday they have arrested a 16-year-old boy for allegedly participating in the online attacks against Visa and MasterCard as part of a vigilante campaign to support WikiLeaks.
The secret-spilling site has raised the ire of the U.S. government and others around the world for its ongoing release of secret diplomatic cables allegedly provided to the site by Army Pfc. Bradley Manning. Though only a small portion of the 250,000 cables WikiLeaks possesses have been released so far, the cables include revelations about how countries in the Middle East urged attacks on Iran, what the U.S. diplomatic corps thinks of world leaders such as Russian President Vladmir Putin, and the details of behind-the-scenes negotiations on repatriating Gitmo prisoners, among other topics.
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While a lot of the rhetoric from the US government — concerning Wikileaks and Julian Assange and whether or not any law was violated — has been overwrought and full of hyperbole, it appears that the Congressional Research Service (which tends to do a damn good job most of the time) has put out a nice simple report detailing the specific legal issues and laws that might apply here (pdf), and more or less summarizes that the US government would be breaking new ground in charging Assange, and may have difficulties in succeeding.
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Finance
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Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.), the incoming chairman of the House Financial Service Committee, on Thursday approved Paul’s bid to lead the Domestic Monetary Policy Subcommittee.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Connecticut state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal Dec. 10 compelled Google to turn over data collected from Connecticut citizens via insecure WiFi networks with Street View.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A model named Michael “Shagg” Washington is suing Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive Software for a cool $250 million for allegedly basing the lead character in the game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on his troubled youth.
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The superpowers of many comic book heroes and villains are often in a state of flux. Powers can be gained, lost, used up, given away, abandoned, shared, and stolen, which sounds a lot like the attributes of property. Comic book characters even speak of powers as though they were possessions. Here we consider whether superpowers should be treated as personal property and the legal consequences of that view.
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This Article challenges copyright’s prevailing narrative on personhood, which has typically focused on the identity interests that authors enjoy in their creative output.
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Copyrights
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Canada’s Supreme Court is hearing a defamation case in which the point of law under contention is whether a link counts as publication. The case involves Wayne Crookes, owner of a legal registrations firm, and Jon Newton, who runs a news site specializing in the peer-to-peer filesharing world.
Crookes sued Newton for defamation: not for what he wrote, but for links to other articles that contain defamatory material.
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Of course, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that Summit Entertainment thinks this way. The company has built up quite a reputation for being an intellectual property bully. In the past 15 months or so, we’ve had multiple different stories of Summit’s overly aggressive attempts at IP enforcement, often threatening or suing people doing completely reasonable things, such as creating a fanzine or filming a documentary about the town where Twilight is supposed to take place. And that’s not even getting into questions about The Hurt Locker and its lawsuit campaign against thousands of file sharers — because that was really done by the movie’s producers, Voltage, rather than Summit. Of course, all these actions are doing is reminding me to avoid any pictures associated with Summit.
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As in most of its recent lawsuits, Righthaven seeks in Wednesday’s lawsuit damages of $150,000 as well as forfeiture to Righthaven of the drudgereport.com and drudgereportarchives.com website domain names.
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The owner of BitTorrent meta-search engine Torrent-Finder, one of the sites that had its domain seized recently, is determined to put up a fight against the actions of the U.S. authorities. The Egyptian founder of the site has hired an attorney to assist him in regaining control over the website he maintained trouble-free for more than half a decade.
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Former Las Vegas Journal Review publisher and Stephens Media CEO Sherman Frederick was the main champion behind Righthaven. Early on he was the one who explained (in bizarre, nonsensical terms) why the LVRJ was funding and supporting Righthaven, and mocked those who pointed out the ridiculousness of his position. Part of his reasoning was that putting copyright infringing content on your website or blog is absolutely no different than stealing the Corvette out of his driveway. Even if we ignore how this is completely wrong (someone copying content doesn’t remove that content from his site, and he still has the content, etc.) and grant him that premise, it seems rather odd that Frederick himself has now been caught posting infringing material to his own blog.
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In an apparent effort to give customers a reason to buy DVDs instead of renting them, movie studios have begun disabling certain features of new releases on discs rented out by Blockbuster and Netflix.
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So, I’m not too surprised to hear reports that the Turkish government is now scrambling to try to copyright its own national anthem after hearing that GEMA tried to collect royalties on it. The story is a bit confusing but it appears that GEMA, in standard collection society fashion, demanded that a Turkish school in Germany pay up for performing music. The school responded that the only music that was performed was the Turkish national anthem. This is where some of the dispute comes in. It appears that GEMA believes other covered music was also performed, and its asking for royalties from that and saying it never meant to collect for the Turkish national anthem. However, the school insists that was the only song performed — so it went to the Turkish Culture Minister to ask for help. At that point, the Turkish government realized that there simply was no copyright on the song.
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Earlier this year, we warned that the growth rate was slowing, and now as we hit the end of the year, it’s confirmed that while there’s still some growth, it’s slowed down dramatically. Betting on digital sales as the key business model for music is, and is going to remain, a mistake. There are lots of other opportunities to make money, but you have to think beyond just selling music.
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Do some P2P file sharers see themselves as the Robin Hoods of the digital age—taking from the greedy content companies and giving to the global have-nots? Amidst all the angst over illegal Internet file sharing and what to do about it, there’s a related debate raging over two questions—why do people share files and what do they think about the ethics of the practice?
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The one thing that surprises me, though, is that while he’s using Bandcamp to handle sales of the CD, he’s not offering downloads via Bandcamp, where he could do things like offer flexible pricing. Instead, you have to buy it from iTunes. Kind of strange.
Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat Compiz-Fusion
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Since the new year in almost every school in the Amur Region will the computer revolution. 31 декабря закончится действие лицензии на пакет программного обеспечения от компании Microsoft, установленного на большинстве школьных компьютеров. December 31 will end the license for the software package from Microsoft, is installed on most school computers. Его сменит свободное программное обеспечение, которое будет работать на базе операционной системы Linux. He was replaced by the free software that will operate on the basis of the operating system Linux.
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Sonakshi Pandit, studying for a doctorate in education at the University of Pune, hopes the laptop will force teachers and students to update their teaching and learning styles.
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Server
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The global race for supercomputing power continues unabated: Germany’s Bavarian Academy of Science has announced that it has contracted IBM to build a supercomputer that, when completed in 2012, will be able to execute up to 3 petaflops, potentially making it the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
To be called SuperMUC, the computer, which will be run by the Academy’s Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Germany, will be available for European researchers to use to probe the frontiers of medicine, astrophysics and other scientific disciplines. (The MUC suffix is borrowed from the Munich airport code).
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Kernel Space
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Oracle’s been vigorously working on their VM VirtualBox 4.0 software and in just the past week they have delivered two public betas that bring a number of new features. Among the changes there is support for Intel HD audio / ICH9 to guest VMs, the concept of extension packs, user-interface improvements, support for limiting a virtual machine’s CPU time and I/O bandwidth, 3D acceleration fixes for guests, and a great number of bug-fixes. How though is this updated Oracle/Sun virtualization platform comparing to the older VirtualBox 3.2 release and that of the upstream Linux KVM (the Kernel-based Virtual Machine) that most Linux distributions rely upon? Here are a number of benchmarks that seek to answer this very question.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that OpenEmbedded core developer and Yocto Project maintainer Richard Purdie has been appointed to the position of Linux Foundation Fellow.
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Once tuned, Linux’s latency (and the router’s latency) can be really nice even under high load (even if I’ve not tried hard to get to the theoretical minimums). But un-tuned, I can get many second latency out of both Linux home routers and my laptop, just by heading to some part of my house where my wireless signal strength is low (I have several chimneys that makes this trivial). By walking around or obstructing your wireless router, you should be easily able to reproduce bufferbloat in either your router or in your laptop, depending on which direction you saturate.
With an open source router on appropriate hardware and a client running Linux, you can make bufferbloat very much lower in your home environment, even when bufferbloat would otherwise cause your network to become unusable. Nathaniel Smith in a reply to “Fun with Wireless” shows what can be done when you both set the txqueuelen and change the driver (in his case, a one line patch!)
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Graphics Stack
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We have just been told that the 10.0 “Dharma” release of XBMC is due out this coming week. XBMC 10.0 presents a unified add-on framework and a lot of features related to this work for providing new functionality, initial gesture support for the XBMC GUI Engine, improved mouse support, Broadcom Crystal HD decoding support, native support for unencrypted Blu-ray playback, support for Google WebM, and many other changes. While XBMC 10.0 isn’t even out the door, XBMC 11.0 “Eden” is already well into planning.
Besides what’s already been mentioned, other XBMC 10.0 features include initial support for OpenGL ES 2.0 to allow the Linux renderer to support embedded devices, SSH file transfer protocol support, a number of new movie/video scrapers have been introduced, an improved video scanner engine, an improved meta-data scraper engine, upgrades against FFmpeg, and much more.
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Put out earlier this morning on Phoronix were Linux virtualization benchmarks comparing the native performance of a high-end Intel Core i7 system to that of the de facto standard Linux KVM virtualization method as well as Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2.12 and Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.0 Beta 2. These tests focused largely upon the disk and CPU performance within Ubuntu Linux virtual machines, since that’s often where enterprise users are most concerned with virtualization performance. For desktop users, there’s also the matter of 2D/3D acceleration support within virtual machines.
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xorg-server-1.9.3 is the third maintenance release of the 1.9 branch of the X11 server from X.org. It includes numerous bug fixes to address performance, stability, and correctness. This version is functionally equivalent to the second release candidate. The list below summarizes all changes since 1.9.2.
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AMD’s Toronto developers working on the ATI Catalyst Linux driver have just released their last public update of the year. The Catalyst 10.12 Linux driver (along with the Windows version) is now available for those interested in this high-performance, but proprietary, driver.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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If you are a Linux gamer there’s a lot of hopeful opportunities coming up especially with up to four Linux games coming from Unigine, but that’s still months out. Right now though if you’re looking for a new Linux native game to play, Frozenbyte is looking for testers of their Linux client port of Trine.
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There were proposals from approximately 15 game studios to this Linux game competition that was launched by this Russian company late last month.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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We’ve already covered all the new features in Clementine 0.6 (release candidate at the time) so this post is just a small update to let you know that Clementine 0.6 stable has been released. There are no new features since the RC, only bug fixes.
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GNOME Desktop
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A new Haguichi version (1.0.3) has been released today which adds theme specific panel icons for Humanity, Ambiance, Radiance, Elementary and Elementary Dark.
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It has become quite a different beast in some ways, having grown for the first time to over 200 MB size and introducing KDE 4 and 64-bit to Slax among others, like its founder had envisaged for the future of the project. At the same time it has also created a small team of developers familiar enough with the system to continue if the project is abandoned, or to help Tomas M out, should he decide to return for Slax 7. On the other hand I wonder if this is not just an operating system for a small group of hardcore fans now that it has had its time and may become increasingly irrelevant, in a day and age where almost every distribution offers a convenient graphical way to copy to a USB device and back or create spins. In any case, I am glad it’s still around, and will keep using it from time to time just for fun.
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Debian Family
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My Lenovo T410s has a rather small 80 GB SSD, and with the amount of data that I need to deal with these days, something like mounting network drive isn’t fast enough for me. So I decided to try USB 3.0, since I have an open ExpressCard slot.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Hopefully this “software-properties” feature will be backported to older Ubuntu versions; meanwhile you can use Launchpad Getkeys to fix the missing GPG keys.
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Phones
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Android
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Earlier this year Google announced they would be switching to the EXT4 file-system on their Linux servers (previously they were still using the mature EXT2) and at the same time it was made available they had hired Ted Ts’o, the lead developer of this file-system currently in use by a majority of the new Linux desktop distributions. Google’s continuing to love the EXT4 file-system and now with their new Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” operating system for smart-phones and other mobile devices, they are switching to EXT4 there too.
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This is another reason why I’m glad to see ext4 being used on Android is that it validates my decision to keep working on ext4 2-3 years ago, even though newer filesystems like btrfs were promised to be coming down the pike. As I’ve said many times before, file systems are like fine wine, and they take many years to mature. So having ext4 ready today is a great way of giving more choices to developers and system administrators about what file system they want to use.
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For free software advocates, these same projects are each seen as important successes. Because every piece of free software respects its users’ freedom, advocates of software freedom argue that each piece of free software begins with an inherent ethical advantage over proprietary competitors — even a more featureful one. By emphasizing freedom over practical advantages, free software’s advocacy is rooted in a technical reality in a way that open source is often not. When free software is better, we can celebrate this fact. When it is not, we need not treat it as a damning critique of free software advocacy or even as a compelling argument against the use of the software in question.
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Getting into the middle of a discussion on the virtues of open source versus free software is about as smart as trying to reconcile the two major US political parties at this point in history–in other words, a fool’s errand.
But I’ve been called worse, so here goes.
Benjamin Mako Hill is a well-known and -respected free software developer and activist, whose opinions I pay attention to, even if I don’t always agree with them. In this month’s Free Software Foundation Bulletin, Hill wrote an essay entitled “When Free Software Sucks,” which he has republished for public consumption under the title “When Free Software Isn’t Better.”
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I have a kind of a fetish – the idea that source code, even old or extremely specific for a single use, may be useful for a long time. Not only for porting to some other, strange platform, but for issues like prior art in software patents, for getting inspiration for techniques or simply because you don’t know when it may be of use. For this reason, I try to create public access archives of source code I manage to get my hands on, especially when such codes may require a written license to acquire, but may then later be redistributed.
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1. They find that open source software helps improve national sovereignty, which is a very important goal for helping the government to do its job.
2. Open source improves economic development.
3. Open source helps to grow global knowledge.
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In India, open source adoption has transitioned from mere hype to reality. It has graduated from a model driven purely by the developer’s community to one where the industry is the key driver. For CIOs, the benefits of open source software (OSS) have moved beyond cost and its usage has expanded beyond operating system to core applications.
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Cellecta, Inc., a provider of screening services for gene function analysis and therapeutic drug target discovery, announced the launch of the DECIPHER Project—an open source platform for genome-wide RNAi screening which offers reagents for running genetic knockdown screens, software tools for data analysis, and an open database of genetic knockdown screening results. Funded, in part, by several NIH grants, some jointly undertaken with collaborators at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and The Scripps Research Institute, the DECIPHER Project objective is to provide free reagents and software tools for researchers to perform and analyze comprehensive shRNA knockdown screens and to develop a standardized yet versatile platform for collecting and comparing results from different studies and labs.
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Events
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Head of Strategic Initiatives, Global Technology Office, Virtusa Corporation Chamindra De Silva delivered an address titled ‘Licensing with regards to Open Source Alignment to the Cloud’ at Asia’s largest open source conference ‘Open Source India 2010′ (OSI Days).
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So what does this mean to the event this year? Only good things. We are working harder than ever to get things in place for the most memorable FOSS.IN ever, and make sure that our audiences have the time of their lives. We have always run the event with the objective of giving participants a feel of a “mega event”, the way they happen abroad (and that few people can afford going to), and we are going to make this last one precisely that – set the bar really high before we get off the stage (or fall off it 
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We have been lucky so far – sponsors have been generous, we managed to get online registration up with the help of our friends at DoAttend.com, we managed to get the venue at short notice (though only for 3 days, and right in the middle of the week), and things are going according to schedule.
So come Wednesday, the 15th, we look forward to welcoming the many hundreds of delegates who have already registered, and the many more who will form the inevitable queue, to attend the last FOSS.IN ever.
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We’re gearing up to record our last podcast of 2010, and in this episode we’ll be looking back on a very eventful year for the Linux community. In our Open Ballot – which isn’t really an Open Ballot this time, we’ll admit – we want you to tell us: what was the biggest event in the Linux world for you? Maybe it was the Mageia fork of Mandriva, or perhaps it was the release of MeeGo 1.0. Or maybe Ubuntu’s decision to transition away from X is your killer moment of the last 12 months.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The Mozilla Foundation is unabashedly committed to a free and open web. They see it as a vital part of a healthy digital ecosystem where creativity and innovation can thrive. We couldn’t agree more. And we couldn’t be prouder to have Mozilla’s generous and ongoing support. We were recently able to catch up with Mark Surman, the Foundation’s Executive Director, who talks about Mozilla and its myriad projects, and how his organization and ours are a lot like lego blocks for the open web.
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SaaS
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Predicting trends in computer technology is an easy way to get into trouble, but two developments have been hyped so much over the past decade that there’s little risk in jumping on their bandwagons: free software and cloud computing. What’s odd is that both are so beloved of crystal-gazers, because on the surface they seem incompatible.
The first trend promises freedom, the second convenience. Both freedom and convenience inspire people to adopt new technology, so I believe the two trends will eventually coexist and happily lend power to each other. But first, the proponents of each trend will have to get jazzed up about why the other trend is so compelling.
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Oracle
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While a number of small companies have been ramping up support for a file system called Lustre that Oracle acquired in its Sun Microsystems purchase earlier this year, Oracle itself has no plans to abandon the technology, a company executive told the IDG News Service in an interview.
“Oracle is unwavering in our commitment to the Lustre technology, to the Lustre community and to the broader supercomputer community in general,” said Jason Schaffer, Oracle senior director of product management for storage. “Through the Oracle acquisition, there has been plenty of opportunity for our competitors to say things that are being a little presumptuous, if not overly presumptuous, in [terms of what] Oracle will develop or not develop,” he added.
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CMS
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First impression: If you’ve used Facebook, you know that it offers a grouping feature, to help you direct your posts to the appropriate “friends” and away from inappropriate ones. This is to keep your boss from seeing photos of you puking after a night of drinking. But Facebook’s feature is difficult to use, so much that no one I know uses it, and many people aren’t even aware of it. Diaspora’s “aspects” grouping feature is right up front and easy to use. It quite naturally invites you to partition your “friends” into such groups, while making it absolutely simple to send a post to all your aspects.
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Project Releases
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Python API and tools to manipulate OpenDocument files
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Government
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Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude declares the era of “Major IT Projects” over.
Few will disagree with his observation that the Government has provided “easy margins” for the incumbent IT giants, in fact most will go further and in plain language say that Public Sector IT costs far too much and fails far too often.
Simply getting an accurate figure on the spend is apparently not possible, the best-informed estimates vary from £14bn to over £21bn per year, whatever the figure it is too much – it is more than we spend on income support, more than we spend on the Department of Transport, more than we spend the Army… Worse still, the cost of just the mechanics of the procurement process is, frankly, appalling… We spend more on the IT procurement process than we spend on the Foreign Office – only Defence costs more to procure.
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Openness/Sharing
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Today a new German site launched, IGEL (“Initiative gegen ein Leistungsschutzrecht”; in English, “initiative against a related right”). The site, spearheaded by German lawyer Till Kreutzer, provides information on a possible proposal for a new “related right” for press publishers. Original content on the site is released under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
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Open Data
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Much of the really useful information was hidden away in different systems around the world, and Dr Rosling found that even the biggest institutions were reluctant to share their findings. “Most public data was not made available in a licence where you were allowed to redistribute it. Neither was it in a unified structure or technological format,” he says. “It was better at a national level but at the international level it was awful. The UN, the World Bank and the IMF get free data from member countries, use taxpayers’ money to compile it and then sell it in an inefficient, stupid system. For instance, trade data makes up 80% of public statistics. This is what humans do: they produce and consume stuff. We have new software that can help poor countries understand the fragmentation of their trade but UN Comtrade (the world’s trade database) is still hoarding bulk data. We need to have that data free.”
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Open Access/Content
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The number of journals actively participating in PubMedCentral is growing – now over 1,000 titles; over half provide OA to all articles, and nearly 60% provide immediate free access. Percentage-wise, OA mandates continue to lead in growth, with a total of 24 mandates added to ROARMAP this quarter, with the eprints OA Week Mandate Challenge a likely contributing factor. This fall’s OA Week was the biggest ever. A unique OA milestone this quarter was Jan Szczepanski’s personal OA title collection exceeding 10,000 titles. Looking forward to 2011 and beyond, clearly this is just the beginning! Suggested OA New Years’ Resolutions: adopt and implement an open access mandate policy, join the Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) or both – or just keep up the good work and know that the small efforts the many thousands of us are making are adding up to all the difference in the world.
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When former President Reagan told the head of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down The Berlin Wall in 1987, he was asking for change and openness across the Eastern Bloc.
Editor & Publisher magazine wants that same change and openness for its readers. This week, it tore down its website paywall, allowing visitors to view more of the magazine’s exclusive content.
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An Orange County deputy caused the crash last summer that killed a 91-year-old man who was on his way to the hospital for his daily visit with the sick and dying, the Florida Highway Patrol said Friday.
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If you’re at a job where you don’t feel like your work’s accomplishing much, business consultants Brent Peterson and Gaylan Nielson have a few suggestions for how to stop spinning your wheels with “fake work” and get real work done.
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UK newspapers reading age by GoogleSince Google just brought out its new reading age analysis tool, I’ve used it to compare the UK national newspaper websites. I’ve included three news aggregators – Yahoo, Newsnow and Google – to give a baseline (although Newsnow doesn’t fit the common Yahoo and Google baseline).
No big surprises that the Sun, Mirror and News of the World sit together at the bottom of the list, or that they’re joined there by the commuter freebie Metro; nor that the FT contains almost no “basic” language pages and the most “advanced”. But the middle of the table is more interesting, with the Guardian scoring much the same reading age as the Daily Mail, and the Independent sitting at the top of the qualities isn’t necessarily what I’d have guessed.
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A national Hispanic Republican organization denounced Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s opposition to the DREAM Act on Friday and warned that the stance may hurt her re-election prospects in 2012 should she decide to run.
“We are conservative Republicans who hold traditional military and social values,” the group Somos Republicans wrote in a letter to the senator. “We are troubled by the fact that you failed to recognize that Hispanics in Texas are overwhelmingly in support of the DREAM Act.”
The bill would make illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. before age 16 eligible to begin a path toward citizenship.
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Britain boasts several museums devoted to the history of a single everyday object. You’ll be glad to hear, then, that there’s a museum devoted to possibly the most important everyday object of modern times. A device which didn’t exist 70 years ago, but which now pervades almost everything we do. Its story is told in the National Museum of Computing, which is based in the very building where the world’s very first digital programmable computer was operated. Block H, Bletchley Park.
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“We are very disappointed with this ruling by the Supreme Court. There are many basic consumer issues at stake, and having the Court uphold the lower ruling on a tie vote leaves many of those issues up in the air.
“Because of this ruling, the critical “first sale” doctrine U.S. copyright law is severely limited for goods manufactured outside of the U.S. but sold here. It applies even, as in this case, to goods that have copyrighted logos on them. That means that anyone, from a single person, to a giant corporation, which resells goods made abroad, could find themselves sued under copyright law unless they determine where a product was made and purchase the licensing rights.
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AVAST Software says only 1.8% of people using its Avast! antivirus program have paid for a user license, and that the original 14 – the only ones it’s sold – have been used in over 200 countries ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe – even Vatican City.
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A 26-year-old New Jersey man has plead guilty to stealing and illegally selling an Internet domain in a first-of-its-kind case.
Daniel Goncalves of Union Township entered a guilty plea earlier today in New Jersey state Superior Court for stealing the “P2P.com” domain from Mark Ostrofsky, Albert Angel and Lesli Angel. Prosecutors will recommend that he serves a five-year prison term and pay restitution for his crimes.
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Science
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In research that further bridges the biological and digital world, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco have created bacteria that can be programmed like a computer.
Researchers built “logic gates” – the building blocks of a circuit – out of genes and put them into E. coli bacteria strains. The logic gates mimic digital processing and form the basis of computational communication between cells, according to synthetic biologist Christopher A. Voigt.
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The 45-year-old patient, Jane Todd Crawford, had been misdiagnosed as being pregnant with twins. McDowell, who ran a surgical practice in Danville, Kentucky, offered a different diagnosis — a large ovarian tumor. He decided to risk the previously untried surgery and set Christmas Day for the operation.
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No one works well when tired, and insects are no exception. Just like us, sleepy bees make shoddy dancers and poor communicators.
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Health/Nutrition
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A Virginia federal judge on Monday found a key part of President Barack Obama’s sweeping health care reform law unconstitutional, setting the stage for a protracted legal struggle likely to wind up in the Supreme Court.
U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson struck down the “individual mandate” requiring most Americans to purchase health insurance by 2014. The Justice Department is expected to challenge the judge’s findings in a federal appeals court.
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Security
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Not so long ago, we reported on a paper that purported to blow a hole in quantum key distribution (QKD) systems. Now, researchers at Toshiba have struck back with findings that show that the attack doesn’t really work. To which the original authors have replied, “Well, it depends.”
First, a quick refresher course in QKD (click the link for more detail). Basically, the rules of quantum mechanics allow things like photons to be in two states at once, called a superposition state. But, when we make a measurement, we see only one of these two states, and the photon stays in that state until we do something to it. We can’t tell before we make a measurement if a photon is in one state or a mixture of two, but by making many measurements on similarly prepared photons, we can tell whether a given source produces photons that are in a superposition.
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Yesterday Gawker Media denied reports that their database of 1.5 Million usernames, emails and passwords had been hacked. Comments broadcast via the apparently compromised Twitter feed of Gawker Media’s tech and gadget site Gizmodo strongly suggested a security compromise. Gawker Editorial Director Scott Kidder claimed through his own Twitter feed that “No evidence to suggest any Gawker Media’s user accounts were compromised, and passwords encrypted anyway.”
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Over the last 24 hours Gawker Media’s network of sites have been under attack from a group who have identified themselves “Gnosis,” a seemingly mysterious collective of hackers who has been falsely considered part of the 4chan-related group of renegade vigilantes knows as Anonymous. Via several private email exchanges with Mediaite, an individual claiming to represent “Gnosis” has explained both the reasoning and methodology of his actions, which has led to a compromised commenter database and a content management system.
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You may have seen a number of tweets circulating over the first few hours mentioning “Acai Berries”. Users are reporting that their accounts are tweeting out spam messages containing these words without their consent.
The attack, first reported as a ‘worm’ by Mashable, may actually, it appears, be related to this weekend’s hacking of Gawker Media’s database. @Delbius, leader of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team says: “Got a Gawker acct that shares a PW w/your Twitter acct? Change your Twitter PW. A current attack appears to be due to the Gawker compromise.”
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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As of last week, this CCTV camera remained in place at Queen and Peter, despite media reports that the security cameras erected for the G20 summit last June had been taken down.
Although Toronto Police announced the 71 CCTV cameras acquired for the G20 would be removed upon “the completion of the event, when there’s no longer an issue of security,” research has shown that mega-events such as the Olympics and global summits typically leave a security legacy. Equipment purchased and installed on an ostensibly temporary basis become incorporated into the permanent infrastructure, altering in subtle and obvious ways the physical and psychological terrain of the city.
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In case you were wondering whether pornoscanners are harder on the vast majority of innocent, non-terrorist fliers, or the minuscule minority of terrorists, wonder no more.
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Police have been accused of attempting to prevent seriously injured protesters being treated at the same hospital as officers hurt during last week’s tuition fees demonstration, igniting claims that one student’s life could have been put at risk.
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The anti-fascist protester Blair Peach was almost certainly killed by police at a demonstration in 1979, according to a secret report released today.
Documents published on the Metropolitan police’s website shed new light on the death of Peach, a 33-year-old teacher from New Zealand, whose death marked one of the most controversial events in modern policing history.
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I assumed I was finished, but a female Transportation Security officer yelled at me for “trying to get away from her.” She told me I had to stand in front of her – while I was still barefoot and trying to watch out for my stuff, which had gone through a different scanner – until my scan was read.
I told her I had never undergone this process and was a bit afraid, and she laughed at me and told me I didn’t know what I was talking about.
The woman grabbed my wrist and said she had to look at my plastic watch. I tried to take it off and hand it to her, and she yelled at me not to interfere with her search.
Then, with no explanation, she pulled up my shirt, exposing my stomach and the top of my underwear, and stuck the top half of her fingers inside the waistband of my pants. I yanked my shirt down and told her she was not showing the top of my underwear and my naked stomach to anyone.
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Thailand’s department of special investigation (DSI) is refusing to release the full report on the death of Reuters cameraman Hiro Muramoto following a leak that he was killed by a Thai soldier.
DSI chief Tharit Pengdit said the continuing investigation into the death of Muramoto during the Bangkok red-shirt protests in May could be affected by disclosure.
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British police on Sunday searched a house in connection with the alleged terrorist who blew himself up and injured two others in a busy shopping area in Stockholm – the first jihad-inspired suicide bombing in the Nordic country.
A property in Bedfordshire, north of London, was searched in connection with two blasts which occurred on Saturday afternoon, the Metropolitan Police said.
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The watchdog over the RCMP is urging the police force to clearly tell officers not to hog-tie people after finding the generally forbidden technique was used in 40 per cent of cases in which someone died after being hit with a Taser stun gun.
A new report by the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP also reveals “a number of instances” among the 10 deaths where members who fired the Taser were not certified to use the powerful weapon.
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Chris Selley, Jonathan Goldsbie and Matt Gurney debate whether Police Chief Bill Blair can regain Torontonians’ trust, and how best to hold his political masters to account.
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Cablegate
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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been called a traitor by some critics for posting confidential U.S. government documents on the Internet. This week, The List, looks at other characters who have been labeled traitors in the past.
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The journalist Suelette Dreyfus collaborated qlwith Julian Assange to create Underground, a 1997 book about hackers in Australia and around the globe. Here she reveals the inside story on Assange, the geek who founded WikiLeaks and became the scourge of world governments.
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Wikileaks’ Congressional opponents are recharging their batteries, and while Julian Assange has bigger legal fish to fry in Europe, he could soon be facing the consequences of breaking U.S. law by outing foreign intelligence sources. One of the senators behind the legal push, John Ensign, debated vocal Wikileaks ally Judge Andrew Napolitano on Freedom Watch on Friday, and while he made clear who he was protecting, he had a hard time defining “journalists”– and why Assange doesn’t count.
The Republican Sen. Ensign, along with Senators Scott Brown (R) and Joe Lieberman (I), will introduce a bill in the Senate that would bar journalists from leaking the names of government informants whose lives may be jeopardized by their outing. This would any newswire publishing the information in as much trouble as Wikileaks, though Ensign argued that most news outlets had declined to put out as many names as Wikileaks had.
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Can the government still keep a secret? In an age of WikiLeaks, flash drives and instant Web postings, leaks have begun to seem unstoppable.
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Even as some government officials contend that the release of thousands of classified documents by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange jeopardizes U.S. national security, legal experts, Pentagon officials and Justice Department lawyers concede any effort to prosecute him faces numerous hurdles.
Among them: Prosecutors apparently have had difficulty finding evidence that Assange ever communicated directly with Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, 23, an intelligence specialist who’s widely thought to be the source of the documents, but is charged only with misusing and illegally downloading them.
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The truth? There’s nothing in Swedish law about “sex by surprise” or broken condoms. (Here’s the penal code, see for yourself.) And despite reports to the contrary, Assange’s accusers have always said that this was not consensual sex.
So what are actually very serious charges are being diminished by shoddy reporting and victim-blaming — and it all starts with AOL News. All of the news sources and blogs reporting that the Assange charges are simply “sex by surprise” cite this piece from Dana Kennedy at AOL News.
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Before WikiLeaks, Operation Payback’s initial target was America’s recording industry, chosen for its prosecutions of music file downloaders. From those humble origins, Payback’s anti-censorship, anti-copyright, freedom of speech manifesto would go viral, last week pitting an amorphous army of online hackers against the US government and some of the biggest corporations in the world.
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“Operation Black Face” is an event scheduled on 18th December 2010. People around the internet would display a black profile pic across the major social networking websites to protest against the state’s hostility against whistle blowers (Wikileaks and Julian Assange).
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Jeff Jarvis makes the same argument, suggesting that nothing in the documents is that bad anyway: “the revelation of these secrets has not been devastating. America’s and Germany’s relationship has not collapsed because one undiplomatic diplomat called Angela Merkel uncreative.”
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The United States tried to stop delivery of Russian anti-aircraft missiles to Venezuela in 2009 amid concerns it could pass them on to Marxist guerrillas in Colombia or Mexican drug gangs, The Washington Post said on Sunday, citing diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks.
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As revelations of U.S. government coercive “diplomacy” continue flowing from the whistleblowing web site WikiLeaks, much to the consternation of official Washington, ruling class circles are working feverishly to downplay the seriousness of the leaks.
On the one hand, senior State Department and intelligence officials claim the cables offer “few surprises” and, at least according to The New York Times, the disclosures “have been more embarrassing than revelatory or harmful to national security.”
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It’s come to the attention of some observers that there isn’t much the US can charge Julian Assange with that it can’t charge the New York Times with as well.
After all, the founder of WikiLeaks and the US’s pre-eminent major daily both basically did the same thing: They published confidential State Department cables allegedly stolen by Pfc. Bradley Manning.
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Credit card companies that prevented card-holders from donating money to the secrets outlet WikiLeaks could have their operating licenses taken away in Iceland, according to members of the Icelandic Parliamentary General Committee.
Representatives from Mastercard and Visa were called before the committee Sunday to discuss their refusal to process donations to the website, reports Reykjavik Grapevine.
“People wanted to know on what legal grounds the ban was taken, but no one could answer it,” Robert Marshall, the chairman of the committee, said. “They said this decision was taken by foreign sources.”
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Lawmakers might be getting anxious to wrap up business before the holiday recess, but the House Judiciary panel is pulling the full committee together Thursday to delve into options to tackle the WikiLeaks scandal.
The Department of Justice and Attorney General Eric Holder are faced with difficult legal questions as they decide the best course of action to pursue against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange even as the Capitol Hill drumbeat to charge the WikiLeaks founder under the Espionage Act grows louder.
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Because nothing makes people feel all warm and fuzzy like a live rendition of “Wonderful Tonight”, right?
If there is anything that the WikiLeaks’ cablegate has shown us, it’s that sometimes world leaders have some pretty out there ideas. Case in point: one of the leaked cables has revealed that North Korean officials were campaigning to have Eric Clapton play a concert in Pyongyang.
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The world honey bee population has plunged in recent years, worrying beekeepers and farmers who know how critical bee pollination is for many crops. A number of theories have popped up as to why the North American honey bee population has declined–electromagnetic radiation, malnutrition, and climate change have all been pinpointed. Now a leaked EPA document reveals that the agency allowed the widespread use of a bee-toxic pesticide, despite warnings from EPA scientists.
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Speculation is flying fast and furious over the details of the upcoming WikiLeaks release, fueled in no small part by US official warnings to a number of its allies about how hugely damaging the release could be.
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The Salon blogger and civil libertarian (and sometime POLITICO critic) Glenn Greenwald has quit his post on the board of the liberal ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington over the group’s criticism of WikiLeaks.
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Traditional lines of communication between the people and the press have fallen into such disrepair in America that a whole new approach is necessary to challenge the military-industrial-governmental complex, according to a former CIA analyst sympathetic to WikiLeaks.
“The Fourth Estate is dead,” Ray McGovern, of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, told Raw Story in an exclusive interview. “The Fourth Estate in his country has been captured by government and corporations, the military-industrial complex, the intelligence apparatus. Captive! So, there is no Fourth Estate.”
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Visa, Mastercard and PayPal all enable donations to be made to US-registered groups funding illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank in defiance of international law.
It appears at least one of the major credit cards also enables donations to an extremist Jewish group that has placed a bounty on the lives of Palestinians.
All three have in the last week ceased enabling donations to WikiLeaks. Neither Mastercard nor Visa have explained the basis for their decision to do so. PayPal has backed away from its initial claim that the US State Department told PayPal WikiLeaks had broken the law after the claim was discredited. This is the third occasion on which PayPal has suspended payment services for WikiLeaks.
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Now that Julian Assange is in jail and and Wikileaks has been shut down out of the streets it is time to get the word out. We have created a simple stencil kit for you to download, remix, and do what you will.
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Indoleaks was recently launched as Indonesia’s answer to Wikileaks.
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The former right-hand man to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has created a rival online whistleblowing site that is to launch Monday.
The site, called OpenLeaks, is an alternative model of promoting transparency that Daniel Domscheit-Berg envisioned after leaving the WikiLeaks organization over personal differences with Assange in September.
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Among the hundreds of diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in recent weeks were a number pertaining to extraordinary rendition—the practice of effectively kinapping a suspected terrorist in one country and transporting him to another, usually Arab, nation for interrogation that almost invariably invovles torture. Most of the time, renditions happen quietly; CIA operatives swoop in and out and no one’s the wiser. Then came the February 2003 kidnapping of a cleric named Abu Omar in Milan, Italy. The operation was bungled (the American operatives used unencrypted, trackable cell phones, for starters), and, in a major embarassment to the US, the 23 CIA agents involved were eventually tried by an Italian court. In 2009, they were convicted in absentia of violating Italian law. (Peter Bergen wrote about the case, and interviewed Abu Omar himself, for the March/April 2008 issue of Mother Jones.) Recently, I spoke to Steve Hendricks, a freelance journalist and author whose most recent work is the just-released A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial, about Abu Omar, renditions, and the impact of the Wikileaks disclosures.
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Robertson’s first case was the Oz trial in 1971, in which the magazine was accused of ”corrupting public morals”. The Oz editors were actually convicted under the Obscene Publications Act. But they were acquitted on appeal. And such was the outcry over the original trial result that police more or less gave up trying to bring such cases against subversive magazines. The verdict did not go Robertson’s way, but it ultimately turned into an important victory against state censorship.
In 1995, Robertson was involved in the prosecution of the former Malawian dictator Hastings Banda, who was accused of ordering the murder of opposition politicians. Banda was acquitted. But the case helped to establish the principle that repressive national leaders should not be immune from prosecution. Seven years later, in 2002, the International Criminal Court, which Robertson had long pressed for, was established.
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Since 9/11, press freedom in the West has come under attack as governments argue that national security is more important than transparency. But the hunt for WikiLeaks is a greater danger to democracy than any information that WikiLeaks might reveal.
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It’s not an exaggeration to say that the recent Wikileaks scandal has shaken the Internet to its core. Regardless of where you stand on the debate, various services have simply refused to handle Wikileaks’ business–everything from domain-name providers to payment services–and this has led to many questioning how robust the Internet actually is.
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“Pakistan’s Floods” came third and in fourth was “Korea’s Conflict.” “WikiLeaks Cablegate” came in at No 8.
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The real reason he was worried wasn’t that he thought law enforcement might find out. He was worried about other people in Anonymous finding out – because in that group, to stand up and identify yourself is seen as the worst thing you can do. Stripping off the Anonymous mask is viewed as a form of betrayal by the wider group.
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The Jester, a hacktivist who is normally known for short term denial of service attacks against Jihadist web forums and who recently claimed responsibility for an outage at Wikileaks in the middle of Cablegate (Wikileaks publication of U.S. diplomatic cables) has himself become the target of the large scale hacktivist protest called Operation Payback.
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As Wikileaks continues to run the headlines and release once classified documents, Gillibrand teamed up with Rep. Yvette D. Clarke, chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology, to advocate laws that will examine cyber criminals with a closer eye.
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Some of Australia’s most senior media professionals, including bosses of major newspapers, television networks and websites, have written to Prime Minister Julia Gillard to express their support for WikiLeaks.
The letter was initiated by the board of the Walkley Foundation, Australia’s professional journalism organisation.
The letter said the leaking of 250,000 confidential American diplomatic cables was the most astonishing leak of official information in recent history and its full implications were yet to emerge.
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A secret grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, is meeting to consider criminal charges in the WikiLeaks case, an attorney for the site’s founder, Julian Assange, told the Al-Jazeera network in an interview.
“We have heard from Swedish authorities there has been a secretly empaneled grand jury in Alexandria. … They are currently investigating this,” Mark Stephens told Al-Jazeera’s Sir David Frost on Sunday, referring to WikiLeaks. The site, which facilitates the disclosure of secret information, has been slowly releasing a trove of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables since November 28.
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On the other side are those who believe fundamentally that the world should remake the Web in its own image. This side believes that the Internet at its heart is simply a tool, something that should be shaped to serve the demands of existing institutions. Each side seeks to mold the technology and standards of the Web to suit its particular vision.
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Suharto said: “Indonesia will not use force against the territory of other countries. With respect to Timor, we support carrying out decolonization through the process of self-determination.”
But Suharto convinced Ford of the importance of integrating East Timor into Indonesia, using the threat of communism as his main argument.
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The controversial WikiLeakS.org website (no longer the current website, this now only redirects to a partial mirror of the original website) is still no longer accepting any submissions of leaked documents from ordinary, local or regional whistleblowers.
They and their mainstream media collaborators, have instead, been busy milking the vast amount of secret information which seems to have come from the imprisoned, but as yet unconvicted, low level US Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, Bradley Manning and they have survived various legal and illegal attacks on their computer and internet infrastructure as a result.
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On Aug. 4, Sen. Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat and Senate sponsor of the Free Flow of Information Act, announced that he intended to include in the proposed law new language specifying that WikiLeaks and organizations like it would not be able to use the act to protect the identities of confidential sources.
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But data has a habit of spreading. It slips past military security and it can also leak from WikiLeaks, which is how I came to obtain the data. It even slipped past the embargoes of the Guardian and other media organisations involved in this story when a rogue copy of Der Spiegel accidentally went on sale in Basle, Switzerland, on Sunday. Someone bought it, realised what they had, and began scanning the pages, translating them from German to English and posting updates on Twitter. It would seem digital data respects no authority, be it the Pentagon, WikiLeaks or a newspaper editor.
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The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, will try to win his release from prison tomorrow, a week after being held on remand after Sweden requested his arrest over allegations that he sexually assaulted two women.
Even if the judge at Westminster magistrates court in London grants Assange bail, he could still be held.
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It’s becoming clear as the weeks go on, that the US government’s massive overreaction to the latest Wikileaks releases is doing much more harm to the US’s standings abroad than anything in the documents themselves. So far, most of the reaction from various politicians and diplomats concerning the actual content of the documents was that some of it might be slightly embarrassing, but there’s been nothing all that surprising. Some foreign diplomats have joked back: “you should see what we say about you.” And yet, we’re still hearing claims that Julian Assange needs to be put on trial or (worse) executed, and other forms of “attacks” should be made on Wikileaks itself. All this has done has been to have foreign governments and diplomats start mocking the US for not living up to its claims of supporting freedom of the press and freedom of expression. This will make it much, much harder any time the US tries to stop any form of censorship in other countries, as they’ll immediately point back at how many of our politicians flipped out over Wikileaks.
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The man behind WikiLeaks has won the most votes in this year’s Person of the Year poll.
Readers voted a total of 1,249,425 times, and the favorite was clear. Julian Assange raked in 382,020 votes, giving him an easy first place. He was 148,383 votes over the silver medalist, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey.
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So, who is this latest unknown to come out of nowhere to shape the national debate around a major issue? Bady is a seventh-year PhD student in African literature at the University of California, Berkeley who studies “the literature of empire and colonialism in the last two centuries.” He’s finishing up his dissertation on white Americans in Africa between the civil war and the civil rights movement.
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In this clip from his forum at UC Berkeley, Julian Assange admitted that sources of his had been caught in the past, but argued that “the chances of your source being run over a car are vastly higher” than that of a source of a leaked document being caught…
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Invitations to a secretive inner circle where maintaining confidences is the password for entry can be very seductive. The magnetic effects of power are very effective tools of socialisation and politicians know just how to deploy them to advantage.
Some journalists, however, don’t need to be socialised because they are pre-programmed for obeisance. For those whose natural instinct is collaboration with the state, “don’t tell me, I don’t want to know and shouldn’t be told” is the media ethic of the moment. It’s a form of self-censorship based on the belief that the public cannot be trusted with diplomatic confidences. The challenge, as they see it, is not how to ensure that the public stays better informed but rather how governments around the world can improve their capacity to withhold information.
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Barack Obama has made his strongest condemnation yet of WikiLeaks, as supporters of Julian Assange demonstrated for his release.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Sting operations by wildlife activists in central Africa have broken up highly organised smuggling rings sending endangered species abroad, leading to the arrest of key dealers and the recovery of hundreds of kilos of ivory, turtle shells and animal skins.
The clampdown took place across four neighbouring countries: Cameroon, Gabon, the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo.Observers said the arrests last week, co-ordinated by the Last Great Ape Organisation (Laga), a wildlife law-enforcement NGO, in Cameroon, Gabon, the Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville, marked a big step towards regional enforcement of the laws protecting endangered species.
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The extreme warmth in Northeast Canada is undoubtedly related to the fact that Hudson Bay was practically ice free. In the past, including the GISS base period 1951-1980, Hudson Bay was largely ice-covered in November. The contrast of temperatures at coastal stations in years with and without sea ice cover on the neighboring water body is useful for illustrating the dramatic effect of sea ice on surface air temperature. Sea ice insulates the atmosphere from ocean water warmth, allowing surface air to achieve temperatures much lower than that of the ocean. It is for this reason that some of the largest positive temperature anomalies on the planet occur in the Arctic Ocean as sea ice area has decreased in recent years.
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Like all crazy theories, this one has an ounce of truth at the bottom of it. Although the initial target of WikiLeaks publications was the U.S. government, the first victims were corrupt government leaders, like the heads of the Persian Gulf states, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
According to diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, Putin is the richest man in Russia — and in Europe as well — with $40 billion in secret off-shore accounts. He is reputed to be the co-owner of Gunvor, which exports Russian oil. If that didn’t make Putin angry, the derogatory nickname “alfa-dog” given to him in one of the cables must have sent him up the wall. A highly placed anonymous source in the Foreign Ministry seemed to reflect that anger when he warned WikiLeaks that Russia “has a way of turning off this resource forever.”
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The City of Toronto has declared an extreme cold alert aimed at protecting the homeless and other vulnerable people.
The warning was issued Monday as temperatures plunged in the city to a low of – 13 C. With windchill, it feels like – 25C.
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Finance
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The EU plans to make private lenders cover the losses of any future eurozone debt crisis, the BBC has learned.
The decision may significantly raise the future cost of borrowing for over-indebted eurozone governments.
It is part of a new permanent scheme – to be funded by eurozone governments, but not the UK – to replace existing bail-out funds that expire in 2013.
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What if the greatest scam ever perpetrated was blatantly exposed, and the US media didn’t cover it? Does that mean the scam could keep going? That’s what we are about to find out.
I understand the importance of the new WikiLeaks documents. However, we must not let them distract us from the new information the Federal Reserve was forced to release. Even if WikiLeaks reveals documents from inside a large American bank, as huge as that could be, it will most likely pale in comparison to what we just found out from the one-time peek we got into the inner-workings of the Federal Reserve. This is the Wall Street equivalent of the Pentagon Papers.
[...]
Wait, what? Did you say $12.3 TRILLION tax dollars were thrown around in secrecy by unelected bankers… and Congress didn’t know any of the details?
Yes. The Founding Fathers are rolling over in their graves. The original copy of the Constitution spontaneously burst into flames. The ghost of Tom Paine went running, stark raving mad screaming through the halls of Congress.
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Banks are important. The world economic crisis is due for a good part to insufficient transparency in banks. Wikileaks next document drop may target banks. And a small group of activists is trying to solve those bank problems in a (Open Source) way that may make Wikileaks less necessary.
I already wrote about real openness at the last Open World Forum, but during that conference I also met Simon Redfern of the Open Bank Project (OBP). We only had a few minutes, so Simon could give me only an extra-short explanation, but it was enough to let me eager to know more.
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German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has said his country is willing to discuss greater harmonisation of eurozone tax policy, adding that the next decade is likely to see Europe take significant steps towards closer political union.
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The ongoing evolution of the American suburbs into slums will not be denied. Malls are dying. Now, the classic suburban office park is dying too.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Wikileaks spin-off Brussels Leaks launched out of the blue last Thursday to much excitement in the European capital and Twittersphere beyond.
The European Journalism Centre’s exclusive email interview with an anonymous representative is amongst the very first media contact with the fledgling European whistleblower organisation.
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So let me get this straight. Philip Morris – and all the other tobacco companies – make hefty profits by selling highly addictive substances to people that the company knows will probably give them cancer and/or a host of other life-threatening and painful diseases. Their deaths will cause huge losses not just personally, but economically – to their families, and to the state.
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The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) in the UK is making good on its threat to punish companies that purchase coverage online without public disclosure. The OFT says it has “received undertakings” from at least one company for violating the UK’s fair trading laws—a warning to others that might pay for blog or Twitter posts without admitting to doing so.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, has announced a review of the impact of Transparency on Privacy to inform the Government’s approach to the release of data as part of the Transparency agenda.
The Review will enable Government to ensure that on-going releases of data are done in a way that provides maximum transparency of data consistent with the appropriate level of privacy protection.
Specifically the Review will:
* Support the Government in striking the right balance between transparency and data protection safeguards, and between the interests of wider society and the interests of the individual or corporate body.
* Identify the nature of the risk to privacy of the individual posed by transparency of public data, in particular the potential for ‘jigsaw’ identification.
* Advise the Government on practical approaches to take
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Venezuela plans to include the Internet in a law that regulates the media, under a proposed bill presented to parliament on Thursday that the opposition claims will result in censorship.
Manuel Villalba, a lawmaker from President Hugo Chavez’s Socialist Party, said the law was aimed at protecting citizens.
“Nowhere is the restriction of access to the Internet suggested. There should just exist protection of citizens’ moral and ethical honor,” said Villalba, who heads the National Assembly’s media commission.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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On Friday, 26 November 2010, the 6th session of the WIPO Committee on Development Agenda and Intellectual Property approved a project entitled “Project on Open Collaborative Projects and IP-Based Models”.
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Copyrights
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Washington got high level, detailed briefings on France’s 3-strikes law – also known as the Hadopi law – and the Telecoms Package. With the Motion Picture Association and the RIAA in the loop.
We always thought it, but somehow the leaked cables, released by the Wikileaks website from the American Embassy in Paris, are interesting even in their confirmation of our suspicions. In particular, they reveal how the American entertainment industry lobbied for 3-strikes measures in Europe.
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On Friday, we pointed out that Sherman Fredericks, the former CEO of Stephens Media and publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal (who lost his job last month), seemed to have a rather hypocritical view on copyright infringement, embedding an infringing Saturday Night Live video on his blog. This was the same guy who famously announced that as CEO, he had Stephens Media “grubstake” (i.e., “fund”) Righthaven, the company that has sued bloggers for quoting even snippets of LVRJ articles. He was quoted as saying that it was no different than stealing a Corvette out of his driveway. So, according to Mr. Fredericks, reposting 4 paragraphs out of a 34-paragraph article — or about 12% (as Righthaven did in at least one case) is just like stealing a Corvette. Ok.
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As part of an article investigating the growing phenomenon of eBook piracy, a Scandinavian news outlet interviewed a 19 year-old self-confessed pirate who bragged about his activities. To counter his viewpoint a well known author contributed to the piece, stating that she abhors book piracy since it costs her huge amounts of money. However, her moral stance took a bit of a beating when her son let an embarrassing fact slip out.
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As an example, the coalition cited the litigation against the company behind the LimeWire file-sharing network, which concluded this year with a federal district court ordering the company to shut down the network. The coalition wrote that though the four largest recording companies prevailed in the case, “the LimeWire defendants were able to drag out the litigation for four years. Such massive civil cases do not provide a scalable solution to the full scope of the problem.”
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Over the summer, we had pointed out how disappointing it was that the press relied on an obviously bogus research report from the University of Ballarat’s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory, about how much infringing content was being shared on BitTorrent. As we noted at the time, the folks over at TorrentFreak carefully picked apart the study and showed how it appeared to have been done by folks who didn’t actually understand how BitTorrent and torrent trackers worked. Apparently, the TorrentFreak guys sent a note to the authors offering to help them fix the problems in their study methodology, and all they got back was a sarcastic email from one of the researchers saying that he’d gladly send the Torrentfreak guys a complimentary copy of O’Reilly’s Statistics in a Nutshell, as it “might give further insight into statistical methodology.” Snarky!
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Rogers, one of Canada’s largest Internet providers, has upset many customers with a recent change in their network management systems. Since mid-September both up and downstream BitTorrent traffic has been severely degraded in certain areas, which goes against the company’s network management policy. In addition, the new throttling technology has also slowed down non-P2P traffic in many cases.
Kuwait shuts down Al Jazeera office
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.13.10
Posted in News Roundup at 1:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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One of the best things a Windows user can do for Defensive Computing is to have a bootable copy of Linux on hand. The classic reason being to rescue a broken copy of the operating sytem, but the much more important reason is for on-line banking.
Anyone that does online banking on a Windows machine is taking a huge risk.
Most likely they don’t understand how sophisticated the bad guys are at writing malware. Or, perhaps, they put way too much trust in their antivirus program. Or, they may fail to appreciate how hard it is to keep all the installed software up to date with the latest patches. Perhaps the worst type of infection, a man-in-the-browser, can even defeat two factor authentication schemes.
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I went to GNU/Linux 100% of the time. The patch that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was the fourth catastrophic patch failure I’d had on XP in three years. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I can’t say that Linux has behaved totally angelically either. But… But… with Linux, it’s usually mea culpa, not the damned update or patch.
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On a regular basis we see studies claiming that the way forward in effective IT is with open source concepts. This means open source software, Linux desktops, Linux servers, Linux embedded devices, and the list just keeps on expanding.
At the same time, the forces behind big label proprietary software applications rail back against open source by saying the open source approach to enterprise needs will end up costing more money in the long run. And in instances where FUD doesn’t work, these same companies ride along with the old “legacy software” argument, explaining how open source solutions simply cannot match up in quality to their proprietary counterparts.
[...]
Closer to home, I’ve seen evidence that Canada is also embracing the Linux experience more each day.
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While fans of M$ claim market shares for M$ of 91% and more realistic webstats show 86%, Treflis has estimated the current market share is about 75% (Forbes) and has been trending down. The current web stats lag reality in the market place because current web stats are generated by PCs that have shipped years ago.
We know Apple ships about 4% of PCs shipped per annum (still not in top 10), so the other 20% could be shipping to folks with portable licences likely for XP that they do not have to buy again, illegal installation (no licence), thin clients and GNU/Linux or other OS. That’s a huge slice of the pie in which GNU/Linux can obviously grow. Then there is the huge number of P4ish XP machines that can be installed of GNU/Linux. 50% of all on-line machines by most estimates run XP and likely most of them will not be scrapped. They can run for years more as thin clients or GNU/Linux machines.
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There is news of a “huge” roll-out in Brazil, 1.5 million notebooks running Mandriva GNU/Linux. That sounds like a huge number but in a population of 200 million people it is a drop in the bucket, about one machine per classroom. My impoverished-IT-budget school has 5 or 6 times as many GNU/Linux PCs. If the government of Brazil really wanted to make a difference they could spend a bit more and using GNU/Linux terminal servers and thin clients they could provide many more computers for students.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Yesterday we reported that AMD’s Catalyst Linux driver team lost another key developer with Piranavan Selvanandan, a senior engineer at ATI since 2003 when Matthew Tippett built-up the original ATI Linux driver team, leaving the company. While it’s unfortunate to see AMD lose another long-time Linux engineer, it appears they are hiring for both their open and closed-source Linux driver teams.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Frozenbyte the developers of Shadowgrounds and Trine series are looking for GNU/Linux gamers to test their Trine port !
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Last month the company behind the very advanced Unigine Engine launched a Linux game development competition whereby they would give away a free license to the game development team that came up with the best game idea and would provide a native Linux game client. Submissions for this contest ended on Friday.
[...]
Not only that, but I’ve also learned that one of Unigine’s clients is interested in partnering with the winning team to provide high-quality 3D game content/artwork.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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New KDE versions are released every six months nowadays. Roughly three months are spent on developing new features, the other three are devoted to release preparations. “What’s needed to get things ready for the release?” the curious might ask. “Why does it take that long?” the impatient. I’ll tell you from my perspective as a Marble developer.
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While nepomuk has seen improvements, I thought it was still only being used by dolphin and kontact. But then I did some poking… it can record the source of files downloaded by konqueror. It’s going to be involved in some telepathy thingy. It stores the custom icons for activities. I think there was something about koffice too, although I can’t remember it. For 4.7 we’ll hopefully have apps using it to record what resources they’re using and link them to activities n’stuff – but there hasn’t been time to do that yet. So… the second part is certainly true – even *I* don’t really know where nepomuk is – but I’m not sure if I can count the first part as true or not.
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This time i would like to write about a very underestimated feature of the KDE Community Forums, because i am pretty sure most of you don’t even know what it can do for you.
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Another week is gone and my KWin-GLES branch got further polishing. All developing on the OpenGL ES code is nowadays happening on my notebook using KWin-GLES. So it is already so useable that I can develop on it without real problems. Most of the effects are already ported and can be used. Today I added the first 3D effects, that is CoverSwitch and FlipSwitch and a (locally) half finished Cube Desktop Switch animation. Quite nice to see the new code working as expected 
Only eleven effects are not yet ported, but these include some effects which won’t be ported, such as FPS, Sharpen or Shadow effect.
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I have been dreaming of this feature for ages, and then I bought a tablet PC a few days before it get implemented in Krita when I do not need it anymore But it is still an extremelly cool feature, that was started by Lukáš Tvrdý and finished by Dmitry Kazakov.
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GNOME Desktop
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According to its creator, Synapse is essentially a search tool, which goes through many sources of information to present contents right at the user’s fingertips. I know, it does sound vague, but a few examples really help in understanding how Synapse works.
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Reviews
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Finally, a quick link to an interesting interview with NetBSD’s Amitai Schlair, a member of a committee that oversees the development of pkgsrc and the maintainer of the official NetBSD Wiki: “Originally, the official Wiki wasn’t intended to replace the unofficial one. People who wanted to contribute to a NetBSD Wiki had been doing just fine without us. That’s no longer the case. We want these people to be able to keep contributing to NetBSD as they have, so we’re adapting our Wiki plans to make room for everyone. This entails some careful rethinking — every other official project resource is, by design, writeable only by developers — followed by a fresh batch of integration work. We’d hoped to have time to prepare for a smooth transition from wiki.netbsd.se; alas, it’s not in the cards. Instead, we’re working as quickly as we can to make it possible for everyone to participate in the official NetBSD Wiki. A smooth transition would also, at minimum, involve moving worthwhile content to the new Wiki and providing HTTP redirects at the old URLs for a while. Of course, these require a modicum of assistance from the administrators of wiki.netbsd.se. For users’ sake, I hope assistance will be forthcoming.”
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Red Hat Family
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The government cloud services market just heated up a bit more. Red Hat’s recently announced acquisition of Makara, a platform-as-a-service firm, indicates that the open-source technology provider is ready to compete with the likes of Microsoft and Google. Analysts note that the bottom line of the acquisition is that federal, state and local agencies have more choices for cloud service providers.
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At a time when many Americans are expressing grave concerns about the country’s economic future, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst sees the glass as half full.
Whitehurst said Thursday that the U.S. is well situated to prosper in a global economy where success is increasingly tied to the ability to access, understand and share vast amounts of information.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Just saw Kyle Baker tweet about this. Knowing so many readers are already helping test Ubuntu 11.04 the return of drag and drop ordering of launcher items can’t come soon enough for many…
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The Ubuntu Software Center will reach the 3.1 milestone sometime before the new year and according to the Software Center Wiki it will gain a software review feature. Users will be able to rate and review applications in the center.
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Flavours and Variants
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Ubuntu’s Maverick Desktop edition was, to me, a great success. It’s fast, secure, and slick. Linux-Mint Julia, the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution was, however, a total success. Julia surpassed Maverick in ease of installation and use.
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Phones
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Android
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The source management strategy above includes a code-line that Google will keep private.
[...]
We recognize that many contributors will disagree with this approach.
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Years ago, the “tipping point” for GNU/Linux was discussed as a possibility. We could see the tipping point in 2011 if Android keeps growing and ARM begins to eat into thin clients, desktops, tablets and notebooks. All the ducks are in a row. The final blow to Wintel will be the acceptance of GNU/Linux in all OEM and retail channels.
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YafaRay is a free and open source raytracing engine. Raytracing is a rendering technique for generating realistic images by tracing the path of light through a 3D scene. I have no idea what a raytracing engine means or how critical a client it is to Blender. But this video showcasing different capabilities of YafaRay is an absolute delight to watch.
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What’s useful here is that Netflix is a very different company from either Google or Facebook, say; and so its message of support for open source confirms the latter’s ability to serve a wide spectrum of users. Moreover, the list of open source programs it uses and contributes to extends well beyond the classical LAMP stack that many associate might with free software, which confirms its breadth in a different, but equally important way.
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Events
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Paul Jay, senior editor of The Real News Network, will moderate a virtual panel discussion promoting a dialogue for the technology community about the technological and legal ramifications of the WikiLeaks shutdown.
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Web Browsers
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Oracle
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Oracle has asked the Apache Software Foundation to reconsider its decision to quit the Java SE/EE Executive Committee, and is also acknowledging the ASF’s importance to Java’s future.
The ASF announced its departure from the committee on Wednesday in a blog post, saying Oracle has too much control over Java. “The commercial concerns of a single entity, Oracle, will continue to seriously interfere with and bias the transparent governance of the ecosystem,” reads the ASF blog.
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Other resignations include Tim Peierls and of course Apache. Google will probably follow shortly. They have all realised that they were giving their work and IP to improve a proprietary Oracle product… for nothing.
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ASF will obviously not let Harmony go to the waste-bin. Harmony will be an appropriate name for a replacement Free Software project for Java. A whole industry based on Harmony will emerge in the next year with all kinds of growth opportunities for ambitious people. Oracle will become a life-boat for the truly locked-in. Java being designed to be portable can almost instantly be ported to Harmony under a truly open organization. Expect ASF to announce a new direction in weeks. There is no rush and they will want to get it right.
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CMS
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We are proud to present to you the second release candidate of Drupal 7.0. Although there are still a few known issues that we are working on fixing, we are confident that our code is stable enough for wider testing by the community. Since the last release candidate two weeks ago, we have fixed upgrade path bugs, improved styling in the default “Bartik” theme, numerous bug fixes and improvements to strings, and fixed a critical bug preventing default Views from working. For the full list of changes, see the release notes.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Francisco Garcia-Moran, director-general of the European Commission’s directorate of informatics, refuted a claim made by the president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) that the contract had discriminated in favour of proprietary software suppliers.
In a letter sent last week, Garcia-Moran told FSFE president Karsten Gerloff he had been “totally misleading” when he accused the EC of operating in “direct contradiction” of its own rules on the promotion and use of open source software.
The director-general disputed the lobbyist’s accusation that the contract had been a bad deal for European taxpayers.
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The commission already used 250 open source products, he said. It operated 350 Linux servers and 800 open source web servers. The EC’s open source social collaboration system, called the Flexible Platform, hosted 400 wikis and blogs for 400 commissioners.
* Open source authentication protected more than 300 web applications used by more than 60,000 users.
* It used an open source content management system, and did its invoicing and ordering on open source software as well.
* The EC’s 2,000 software developers were working on more than 600 projects on an open source collaboration platform.
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Licensing
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I’ve been a bit over a week in Taipei, mainly to co-present (with Armijn Hemel) the GPL compliance engineering workshop at Academia Sinica. The workshop was attended by more than 100 representatives of the local IT industry in Taiwan, from both legal and engineering departments.
I think even only the sheer number of attendees is a great sign to indicate how important the subject of Free Software license compliance has become in the IT industry, and specifically in the embedded consumer electronics market.
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Open source software is (of course) distributed (for the most part) under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which grants the right to modify and redistribute the software code itself. There are rules and stipulations covering combined works, combined libraries and conventions covering every element of application structure from object code, to headers and libraries.
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Emoticons first appeared — in rudimentary fashion — over a century ago, but the online infestation of signifiers has definitely reached epidemic status. Nauseated by that scourge of smileys and winks, two valiant enemies of the emoticon have launched a campaign that urges everyone to — at least temporarily — spurn the annoying and inappropriate use of emotionally indicative symbols.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Over the last 24 hours Gawker Media’s network of sites have been under attack from a group who have identified themselves “Gnosis,” a seemingly mysterious collective of hackers who has been falsely considered part of the 4chan-related group of renegade vigilantes knows as Anonymous. Via several private email exchanges with Mediaite, an individual claiming to represent “Gnosis” has explained both the reasoning and methodology of his actions, which has led to a compromised commenter database and a content management system.
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As much of the world on Friday focused their eyes on the empty seat in Oslo that starkly represented the absence of the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, a lone Chinese blogger posted the image of a chair on the country’s most popular microblogging site.
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In one narrative of the “War on Terror,” President Bush scrapped the protections of the Geneva Conventions — including Common Article 3, which prohibits “cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” — for prisoners at Guantánamo, and established the prison as an offshore interrogation center to protect the United States from further terrorist attacks. This narrative is distressing enough, as it involves a deliberate attempt to discard domestic and international laws and treaties so that prisoners seized in wartime — mixed up with a handful of terrorist suspects — could be held indefinitely and subjected to torture, but it is not, in fact, the most compelling explanation of the purpose of the detention policies implemented in the “War on Terror.”
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Cablegate
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WikiLeaks neither supports nor condemns the cyber attacks that have targeted its critics, it said Friday, just as it appears the attackers are mounting a fresh operation against Moneybookers.com.
The whistleblowing website wrote on its Twitter feed that it is not affiliated with Anonymous, a group of online activists that have attacked websites of companies that cut off services to WikiLeaks.
On its website, WikiLeaks went further.
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The controversy created after the release of hundreds of US secret diplomatic cables have raised many important legal issues about national security and freedom of the press under U.S. law, according to Neil Richards, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis.
Journalists and government officials have suggested that either WikiLeaks or The New York Times (NYT) might face legal liability for publishing the contents of diplomatic cables and other leaked documents.In order to find either WikiLeaks/Julian Assange or the NYT liable, the government would need to prove two things – first that a law had been broken, and second that enforcement of the law was constitutional under the First Amendment,” Richards said.
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Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd has defended the legal rights of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who’s preparing to face court in London.
Mr Rudd said yesterday he’s prepared to intervene to have a laptop computer provided for Mr Assange in London’s Wandsworth prison to help the Australian prepare his defence and obtain bail at his appearance at Westminster Magistrates Court on Tuesday.
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But so far, WikiLeaks has shown a remarkable amount of responsibility and discretion.
It has released only 1,000 of the more than 250,000 cables it possesses, and has worked with various other media outlets to redact names and decide which information not to release for reasons of national security.
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Attorney Daniel Klau, a First Amendment expert, particularly on press protections, takes issue with U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman’s suggestion the New York Times should be investigated for printing stories based on documents released by WikiLeaks.
“I certainly believe that WikiLeaks has violated the Espionage Act, but then what about the news organizations — including The Times — that accepted it and distributed it? To me, The New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship, and whether they have committed a crime, I think that bears a very intensive inquiry by the Justice Department,” Lieberman, I-Conn., said on Fox News.
Klau, a partner with Pepe and Hazard in Hartford and president of the Connecticut Foundation for Open Government, said the Supreme Court has been clear in several cases where it defined the role newspapers play in this scenario.
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Outgoing Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva threw his support behind WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and questioned how the Australian’s arrest squared with international protestations about freedom of expression and of the press.
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Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
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The Justice Department would kind of like to prosecute Julian Assange, who most recently leaked a list of “vital” U.S. facilities worldwide. All it has to do is figure out what crime the WikiLeaks founder has committed. Prosecuting Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917 might proving tricky: The government has never successfully prosecuted someone for receiving leaked information, and it’s never even tried to prosecute a journalist, which Assange claims to be. Thus, government lawyers are looking at approaching the affair from other angles, as well. Other potential crimes include “trafficking in stolen property” and conspiracy, The New York Times’ Charlie Savage reports.
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After I highlighted the multiple factual inaccuracies in Time’s WikiLeaks article yesterday (see Update V) — and then had an email exchange with its author, Michael Lindenberger — the magazine has now appended to the article what it is calling a “correction.” In reality, the “correction” is nothing of the sort; it is instead a monument to the corrupted premise at the heart of American journalism.
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The House Judiciary Committee is planning a Dec. 16 hearing on the legal issues surrounding WikiLeaks, making it the first congressional committee to do so since the organization began releasing U.S. diplomatic cables last month.
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They have, but they have also published actual (in some cases redacted) cables. Thus far, WikiLeaks has really just posted the same cables the news organizations it worked with have, with the same redactions. There is not that much of a difference between what WikiLeaks has done and what the Times and the others have done. That doesn’t mean that the Times, in doing so, did anything wrong.
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There are likely few people reading the State Department cables released by Wikileaks with greater interest than students of international relations, who have every personal, academic, and professional reason to explore the inner workings of U.S. diplomacy. So it must have surprised the would-be diplomats of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs to receive an email last week from the Office of Career Services warning that — according to an unnamed Columbia alum in the State Department — any student who so much as tweeted about the cables could jeopardize his or her hopes of getting any job with the federal government that requires security clearance. “The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents,” the email read. “He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter.”
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But isn’t there such a thing as free speech in America?
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But Assange has portrayed himself as a crusading journalist: He told ABC News by e-mail that his latest batch of State Department documents would expose “lying, corrupt and murderous leadership from Bahrain to Brazil.” He told Time magazine he targets only “organizations that use secrecy to conceal unjust behavior.”
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Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness held lengthy negotiations with the former Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern to save the Northern Ireland peace process in the full knowledge that the IRA was planning to carry out the biggest bank robbery in its history, according to leaked US cables passed to WikiLeaks.
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The 2009 crash of a stolen plane near the capital city of Brasilia exposed Brazil’s vulnerability to terrorist acts, said a U.S. diplomatic cable released Sunday by WikiLeaks.
On March 12, 2009, a man kidnapped his 5-year-old daughter, hijacked a small plane, and flew around of the city of Goiania for two hours before crashing into the parking lot of a shopping mall, killing himself and the girl. The crash “highlighted a vulnerability to potential terrorist actions,” then-Ambassador Clifford Sobel wrote in a memo.
Brazilian authorities considered shooting down the plane, which had no flight plan and was viewed as a threat, according to the March 28, 2009, report. Air defense authorities followed the country’s shootdown procedure, illustrating “the extreme caution with which a possible shootdown is approached, the broad understanding of the shootdown policy among air traffic controllers and the fact that the procedures are executed as written,” Sobel said.
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The Foreign Office stands accused of misleading the public over the plight of thousands of islanders who were expelled from their Indian Ocean homeland to make way for a large US military base.
More than 2,000 islanders – described privately by the Foreign Office as “Man Fridays” – were evicted from the British colony of Diego Garcia in the 1960s and 70s. The Foreign Office, backed by the US, has fought a long legal battle to prevent them returning home.
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So with this context, I’ve been watching the Wikileaks attack with great interest. It has been suffering a pretty big network attack (Wikileaks claims about 10Gbps, which is big enough to take down all but a couple dozen or less ISPs in the world; arbor claims about 2-4 Gbps, which is still big enough to cause the vast majority of ISPs in the world major disruption). The attack successfully took its site offline at its main hosting ISP. Wikileak’s textbook response was to move to Amazon’s web services, one of those core Internet services capable of defending against big network attacks.
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Qatar is using the Arabic news channel al-Jazeera as a bargaining chip in foreign policy negotiations by adapting its coverage to suit other foreign leaders and offering to cease critical transmissions in exchange for major concessions, US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks claim.
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AMERICAN diplomats secretly sent uranium on a commercial airliner, in violation of US government rules about the abuse of the diplomatic bag system, and laws governing the air transportation of hazardous materials.
The metallic powder was sent from the US Embassy in Burma, according to a cable published by WikiLeaks.
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For the past 300 years, the relationship between the press and the state has been straightforward: the press tries to publish, the state uses its various mechanisms to thwart those efforts. This has produced a cat-and-mouse steady-state, a balance where selection pressures kept the press tamed and the state – in many circumstances – somewhat accountable to the governed. There are, as always, exceptions.
In the last few months, the press has become ‘hyperconnected’, using this extreme connectivity to pierce the veil of secrecy which surrounds the state. The press now uses that same connectivity to distribute those secrets to everyone, everywhere who wants them. The press has suddenly become incredibly powerful, unlike anything ever experienced before.
WikiLeaks is the press, but not the press as we have known it. This is the press of the 21st century, the press that comes after we’re all connected. Suddenly, all of the friendliest computers have become the deadliest weapons, and we are fenced in, encircled by threats – which are also opportunities.
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To the United States, Julian Assange may now be Public Enemy Number One. Some American politicians have even called for his execution.
But less than a year ago, the founder of WikiLeaks was officially entertained at a US Embassy cocktail party by one of the very diplomats whose secrets he would soon spill to the world.
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It is not clear if the mistake first appeared on a blog or flitted around in a Twitter message. But whatever its source, it swept Mark Jeftovic and his company, EasyDNS, into both sides of the storm over corporate support, or the lack thereof, for WikiLeaks.
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Access to Wikileaks.org has returned after members of its consortium worked with Mark Jeftovic, founder of EasyDNS, to help them get their domains back online.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s lawyer says he has seen secret police documents that prove the whistleblower is innocent of rape claims made against him by two women in Stockholm.
Björn Hurtig, who is representing Mr Assange in Sweden, said the papers, which form part of the official Swedish investigation, reveal both women had ‘hidden agendas’ and lied about being coerced into having sex with Mr Assange, 39.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Concentrations of the main greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached their highest level since pre-industrial times, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said today.
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The chances of northern Europe facing a new ice age, or of catastrophic sea-level rises of almost four metres that swamp the planet over the next century, have been ruled out by leading scientists.
But the risk of tropical forests succumbing to drought brought on by climate change as well as the acceleration of methane emissions from melting permafrost, is greater, according to the Met Office Hadley Centre, in its latest climate change review.
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Finance
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In a rare moment of candor last week, the third-ranking Republican in the House admitted the failure of the Bush tax cuts. “You know, I think it’s fair to say, if the current tax rates were enough to create jobs and generate economic growth we’d have a growing economy,” Mike Pence acknowledged, adding, “It’s not working now.”
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Tomorrow, on high streets across the country, there are likely to be sit-ins in Topshop, blockades of BHS, flash mobs in Dorothy Perkins, and occupations of Miss Selfridge. Why? Because Sir Philip Green, owner of the Arcadia Group of retailers, ninth richest man in Britain and a government adviser, is a tax avoider.
While Green lives and works in the UK, the Arcadia Group is registered in the name of his wife, Tina, who is resident in Monaco and so enjoys a 0% income-tax rate. In 2005 this arrangement allowed the Greens to bank £1.2bn, the biggest paycheck in British corporate history, without paying a penny in tax. This completely legal dodge cost the British taxpayer £285m, enough to pay the salaries of 9,000 NHS nurses or the £9,000 fees of close to 32,000 students. In an age of austerity, the link between tax avoidance and public sector cuts becomes crystal clear.
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Janet Tavakoli talked about the federal government’s role in regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. She also responded to telephone calls and electronic communications.
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Do not forget: Virtually all the major players who brought us into the crisis are still there: the government officials, the CEOs, the investment bankers. The permanent plutocracy has survived unscathed. At a minimum, American citizens are entitled to know what happened.
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For two years, the two sons of jailed financier Bernard Madoff portrayed themselves as honest whistleblowers of their father’s historic fraud. A court-appointed trustee depicted them as bungling money managers who did nothing to protect investors.
The suicide of Mark Madoff leaves unanswered questions for investors seeking payback for the billions of dollars his father siphoned – and for criminal investigators who continued to pursue charging Madoff’s family for knowing participation in the fraud.
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President Barack Obama’s plan to cut payroll taxes for a year would provide big savings for many workers, but makes Social Security advocates nervous that it could jeopardize the retirement program’s finances.
The plan is part of a package of tax cuts and extended unemployment benefits that Obama negotiated with Senate Republican leaders. It would cut workers’ share of Social Security taxes by nearly one-third for 2011. Workers making $50,000 in wages would get a $1,000 tax cut; those making $100,000 would get a $2,000 tax cut.
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BRIAN MOYNIHAN isn’t one to look back. And as the chief executive of Bank of America, he has plenty of reasons not to.
His company is staggering under the weight of his predecessors’ decisions, and each day seems to bring more bad news. More than 1.3 million of the bank’s customers are behind on their home loans, all 50 state attorneys general are investigating the industry’s foreclosure practices and Bank of America has become a leading symbol of the mortgage mess.
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Some people are doing fine. Others are barely getting by and still trapped in a deep recession. A 9.8% unemployment rate is unacceptable … something to remember this time of year. Best to all.
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Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, has been attacked for failing to foresee the financial crisis, for bailing out Wall Street, and, most recently, for injecting an additional $600 billion into the banking system to give the slow recovery a boost.
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The men share a common goal: to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable — and controversial — fields in finance. They also share a common secret: The details of their meetings, even their identities, have been strictly confidential.
Drawn from giants like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the bankers form a powerful committee that helps oversee trading in derivatives, instruments which, like insurance, are used to hedge risk.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The Korean Communications Commission [official website] generally criticised [ITProPortal report] Facebook’s privacy policy, handling of personal information and the use of personal data of third parties. In particular, Facebook is said to be in breach of Article 22 [text, PDF] of the South Korean Act on Promotion of Information and Communication Network Utilization and Information Protection, which states “If an information and communications service provider intends to gather user personal information, they shall obtain user consent.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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You’re bored on a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon, so you settle onto your divan and call up a streaming movie on Netflix—Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death, say. What happens then? You might imagine that the film gets shuttled to your house from a server in Netflix’s California headquarters. If every Netflix customer accessed the same data center, however, it would get overwhelmed with streaming requests and the network along the way would likely become clogged with Netflix traffic. Your movie, meanwhile, would look glitchy and terrible.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Back in September the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) confirmed that it was investigating a major data breach at ACS:Law, after the unencrypted details of thousands of broadband users, who reportedly signed up to BSkyB services and were thought to be illegally sharing pornography, was leaked on its website. This website is still not operational months later.
That breach could see the ICO hitting ACS:Law with a maximum penalty of £500,000.
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Prosecuting the criminals that steal content is one way of fighting piracy. Over at Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX), they’re adopting a more opportunistic attitude, closely tracking pirates in hopes of converting them into consumers.
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ACTA
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Following the release of the final, legally-verified version of ACTA (dated December 3rd), we have updated our analysis of the most worrying provisions of this dangerous anti-counterfeiting agreement.
ACTA AS A BULLYING WEAPON FOR THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRIES
By putting legal and monetary pressure on Internet service providers (in a most subtler way than in previous versions of the text), ACTA will give the music and movie industries a weapon to force them to police their networks and users themselves. Such a private police and justice of the Net is incompatible with democratic imperatives and represent a real threat for fundamental freedoms.
Konqueror Rocks! on KDE 4.5.1
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.12.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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On the show this week: A ton of WikiLeaks news, some Fedora stuff, our very first Ask Jez and much more as usual…
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Google
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It’s hard to believe, but it’s already been a full year since we launched the Google Chrome extensions gallery.
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On Tuesday, we announced a number of updates to Chrome and Chrome OS. For me, these announcements were among the most important of my working life—demonstrating the real power of computer science to transform people’s lives. It’s extraordinary how very complex platforms can produce beautifully simple solutions like Chrome and Chrome OS, which anyone can use from the get-go—as long as you get it right. And that’s very, very hard indeed as history has taught.
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This week, Google unveiled a computer like no other: the Cr-48, a notebook that relies on the Web for all its software applications. Yet the Web search giant thinks the notebook can compete with computers that run all kinds of installed software.
The matte black Cr-48 won’t be sold to the public, but thousands are being sent to consumers and businesses who have volunteered to test it. It introduces a new kind of operating system, called Chrome OS, that turns to the Web for almost everything. Google is pitching Chrome OS as its vision for a new form of computing—one that shifts the data, functionality and almost everything else you would expect from your desktop computer into the cloud. Chrome OS will get its biggest test when Acer and Samsung start selling notebook computers customized to run the software in mid-2011.
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At our Chrome event on Tuesday, we showed how Chrome notebooks can make computing simpler.
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You must let them take statistics about your browsing.
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Free Software community has been working hard to get control over our computing. Free Software Foundation and similar organizations have been running various projects to release us from the clutches of proprietary technologies. Now, we have reached a point where are quite rich when it comes to the wealth of free and open source software.
Suddenly, we see the emergence of cloud computing — arrival of Google Chrome netbooks and JoliCloud. How much should I, as a free software user, be concerned? Very much.
As an individual user, cloud computing means I lose control from the computation, processing of my data as I don’t run/own the software which process my data. I will never be able to see the code or tweak it to improve performance if I want, because it runs on the servers of some giant corporate far far away in a distant galaxy. Cloud renders mute the whole concept of FOSS, the fun of hacking.
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Kernel Space
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PrimeSense, the company behind Kinect has released open-source drivers and established an Natural Interaction devices, applications and middleware organisation named OpenNI.
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PrimeSense, the company behind the 3D depth sensing technology in Microsoft’s Kinect accessory, has joined with two other companies to release a set of open source drivers for the device.
The OpenNI project — a joint effort between PrimeSense, robotics company Willow Garage and motion control game developer Side-Kick — is a not-for-profit organization created to “certify and promote the compatibility and interoperability of Natural Interaction devices, applications and middleware,” according to its Web site.
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File systems are one of the layers beneath your operating system that you don’t think about—unless you’re faced with the plethora of options in Linux. Here’s how to make an educated decision on which file system to use.
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Graphics Stack
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It was just one year ago that AMD lost its core Linux engineering manager, Matthew Tippett, who had been with ATI Technologies for the better part of a decade and had built up the ATI Linux driver team that went on to make all of the major improvements while Matthew introduced many changes along the way. Tippett left AMD for the United States to head the Linux kernel development of Palm’s (now HP) WebOS software platform and also a pivotal role with us on the Phoronix Test Suite. Today now marks the last day for another ATI/AMD Linux veteran, Piranavan Selvanandan, who is now heading to the same boat after relocating to California.
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Matthias Bach, a researcher and developer on high-performance computing with the Goethe Universitaet Frankfurt am Main, has written in to inform us of this German university’s release of HPL-GPU 1.0. The HPL-GPU software package is a rewritten version of the LINPACK library that is re-engineered to run atop CALDGEMM, which is a DGEMM implementation developed at this university designed to run atop the latest AMD graphics processors.
The HPL-GPU 1.0 package is the code that’s running atop LOEWE-CSC, which is a 832-node CPU/GPU cluster at Frankfurt University’s Center for Scientific Computing. This LOEWE-CSC cluster HPL performance was measured at 285 TeraFLOPS this year making it one of the fastest super-computers in the world. LOEWE-CSC was ranked 22nd on this year’s top 500 super-computer list and took the 8th spot on the green 500 list for the most energy efficient super-computers. This Frankfurt super-computer put outs out a massive 741 MFlops per Watt.
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Applications
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Back up softwares for Linux are not a rarity and there are quite a number of them available for free to download and use. And this is probably because, Linux is mostly used as servers which apparently has the highest need for tools to backup and similar. Here is our compilation of 5 awesome back up softwares for Ubuntu and Linux.
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When a website gets too big, with thousands and millions of documents, it gets harder and harder to manage the entire thing. Some people to keep things organized buy expensive commercial products to regularly index their documents for quick search but there are also some who take advantage of what’s available for free and open source.
In this article, we’ve put together a list of top 20 most popular open source search and indexing packages that you can use on your website for just that and much more.
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Fotoxx is a simple, open source photo editing application for Linux. Fotoxx image editor is incredibly lightweight and packed with all the basic features you could expect in an image editor application. If you haven’t tried Fotoxx yet, it is definitely worth your attention.
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Rockmelt, the much hyped social web browser famously backed by by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, is heading to Linux – only not just yet.
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Proprietary
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Any fan of the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap certainly knows, the tongue-in-cheek bit about how the band’s amplifiers are better than anyone else’s is because when they need that last bit of oomph, theirs go to 11. You know, 1 number past 10.
Well, Opera is getting things together nicely and proving that it is up to the task of outperforming anyone else in the browser field. Always a leader, Opera is leading again, almost effortlessly.
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Instructionals/Technical
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If you’ve recently upgraded to iOS4 (now 4.2) and use Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, you can see your photos in Nautilus, but you have no access to your music using Rhythmbox or GTKPod (the device shows up but quickly disappears). However, you can easily get it to work using the instructions below.
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Wine
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Wine 1.2.2 was released last week as the second point release in the Wine 1.2 stable series, but this week the Wine developers are back to working on Wine 1.4 in the Wine 1.3 development series. Wine 1.3.9 was just-issued and it’s back to bringing some more interesting changes to this free software project, including in-browser ActiveX support and an OpenCL 1.0 library wrapper.
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Games
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Besides falling behind in frame-rates, Apple’s NVIDIA driver also only supports the full OpenGL 2.1 specification where as NVIDIA’s proprietary driver on Linux supports OpenGL 3.3 and other functionality not currently exposed on Mac OS X.
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John Diamond, the lead developer of the open-source Alien Arena game, has emailed in tipping us off that Alien Arena 2011 will be released next week. Alien Arena is a science-fiction first person shooter game that’s powered by a modified id Tech 2 game engine. We first reported on Alien Arena 2011 in October when talking about some of the planned features we were informed of, but as of next week it will be available to all Linux gamers (and those on Windows too) as an early Christmas present — it was just in May that Alien Arena 2010 was released.
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A reader by the name of Markus sent us an email to let us know of Blub Volley, a small, free and fun volleyball game.
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Believe it or not, GNU/Linux is already an amazing game platform. You might find this statement entirely implausible or rather incredulous but I really mean it. I didn’t know this until last evening when I was desperately looking for an open source alternative for the popular game “Guitar Hero”. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much, in fact, I was preparing myself for a total flop, or yet another monotonous copycat of GH. Oh boy… how wrong was I. Not only did I found the sort of game I was looking for, but also, I stumbled upon some other cool open source music games that totally changed my perception about open source games. But don’t take my words for it, just go and search for a very specific genre of games. I assure you that eventually you will find some quality open source alternatives. I do believe some of these games can be competent competitors to their commercial counterparts if they get more attention from the community.
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I have chosen a tricky title. Online games are available for anyone using a modern browser, be they Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD, or Solaris users. All that is required is either a Flash Player or the Java plugin, so if you have those, you can start enjoying online games instantly.
[...]
All right, that would be all. If you’ve read all my gaming articles, most of the stuff written here is not really new. Furthermore, some of the reviewed titles are actually large game repositories, where you will find hundreds of cute games to play. Others are usually more complex standalone games, with in-depth plot and long gameplay. For example, you can RuneScape longer than you can WoW.
The collection is fine-tuned to my own tastes and whims, so you may not like it all, but I think my best of the best list is fairly fair. It has a bit of everything, from classic first person shooters via artillery practice to solid British humor in ASCII. In between, you have some online roleplaying, arcade fighting, puzzles, physics, just take your pick. I honestly believe you’ll find a suitable game for just about anyone and anywhere.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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“It is very easy to recognize a KDE application: one always has to resize it to make it usable!”. That’s what a friend once told me.
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Seasoned KDE developer Tomaz Canabrava, who helped Antonis develop his programming skills, asked him why he chose to contribute to KDE.
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GNOME Desktop
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‘Colors’ is an amazing – dare I say the best (or at least in top 3) – dark GNOME theme. I’ve found out about it from Nick, the Orta theme author who posted a link to ‘Colors’ in a comment on our last Orta post and even though I was a bit skeptic as I don’t like dark themes, after trying it out I must say I am truly impressed. Sure, it’s a matter of taste so you may not like it, but give it a try anyway because you can’t really get the real “feeling” by just looking at the screenshots.
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After the article “Linux Distro as Food” which has been very successful i’ve decided to think this time: If every Linux distribution was a song, which would you choose to listen ?
I’ll try to resume for every distro the keywords that come to my mind thinking at it; add to these keyword the year of publication and the word song, we’ll see what’s the first music video of an artist doing a search in google video.
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Here is the download link. Also, here is the project page, where I’ve also uploaded things like the Openbox theme and icon set from #! 9.04.01 for my own use in creating UberBang 10.04. I hope you enjoy using this as much as I did creating it. That said, given all this random issues, as a #! developer would say, “please do not use this as your main stable system, as it may make your system go CRUNCH! BANG!”
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New Releases
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Another newly found favorite, ArchBang, is going to release a new version in January 2011. Here’s a screenshot. Not that I needed a new release because it is just Arch Linux under the hood and that’s been updating perfectly here for the last two months without any stability problems or other issues. I am now running the latest 2.6.36 kernel etc. with wireless still working.
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Red Hat Family
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There have been the endless bull session threads on the CentOS main mailing list, nominally on the subjects of SELinux and IPv6 the last couple of weeks. I am just not of a mind to tolerate cr*ppy content on mailing lists anymore. On one such list, a ‘regular’ whom I identify as ‘…’ had the misfortune of being the ‘designated bad example’ of the day
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I’m not going to try and turn into Distrowatch and announce every release, but it’s quite exciting to see something moving on this front and have a free clone hopefully rather sooner than later. Also, the SL guys are always making some small additions to RHEL that I appreciate.
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Fedora
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One of my friends was showing me today a Gource-created video of his semester’s work that he made on his Fedora 14 “Laughlin” laptop. It looks really nice, but even though it has a quad-core processor, 4 GB of RAM, and a very nice AMD ATI dedicated graphics card (I don’t know exactly what model/specs), it still took a couple hours to do (i.e. far longer than it should have).
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Debian Family
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The two first interviews were dedicated to long-time Debian developers. This time I took the opposite approach, I interviewed David Kalnischkies who is not (yet) a Debian developer. But he’s contributing to one of the most important software within Debian—the APT package manager—since 2009. You can already see him in many places in Debian sharing his APT knowledge when needed.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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While attending a sprint this week, I’ve gone ahead and updated my Dell mini 10v to Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 1, and also took some updates on Tuesday.
I have to say, I am finding Unity to be running really really well on this computer. I can use the spider diagram to provide a more structured description to what I think is going well, and also, how far we still have to go before we have a shippable product.
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Jason Smith sends this along:
So there was a seemingly simple bug, the launcher would autohide when the quicklist was open.This was due to the fact that the launcher was entirely unaware of when a quicklist was open.
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This post is just a short summary of some updated packages in the WebUpd8 PPAs.
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How many Ubuntu fans also like Japanese Manga comics? My guess would be that it’s a pretty high percentage. The author of this comic series, Hiroshi Seo, is apparently a big fan of Ubuntu, the Linux operating system that many of us have come to love.
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Starting with these 11 desktop models is a great step and I would like to thank the team at HP for their cooperation, at the same time calling out the work of our unsung heroes in Victor Palau’s Canonical certification team.
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As I mentioned recently, the Ubuntu Technical Board is reviewing the most popular topics in Ubuntu Brainstorm and coordinating official responses on behalf of the project. This means that the most popular topics on Ubuntu Brainstorm receive expert answers from the people working in these areas.
[...]
Allison Randal, Ubuntu Technical Architect, answers with an analysis of the problem and the proposed solutions, an overview of current activity in this area, and pointers for getting involved.
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Ubuntu Brainstorm is a wiki-like interface that allows the Ubuntu community to input ideas that might make Ubuntu more usable, friendly, or fun. Almost 20,000 ideas have been entered and have received 2.5 million votes in the two years since its introduction. Entries can be sorted by all ideas, popular ideas, ideas in development, or implemented ideas. Matt Zimmerman, Debian developer and Canonical employee, thinks it might be a good idea to periodically collect and discuss the current status and future possibilities of the most popular ideas.
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Here are a bunch of interesting video demos showcasing native multitouch support in Linux. I especially liked the one which demoed a good looking Dell touch pad running Ubuntu Unity. Edit: A new video has been added taking the total count to 4.
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Flavours and Variants
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Super OS, formerly Super Ubuntu, is a remastered (modified) Ubuntu, a Ubuntu clone if you will, designed to make Ubuntu more usable out of the box. As such, Super OS joins a long line of Ubuntu derivatives, all of which try to extend, enhance and pimpify the basic Ubuntu release.
My personal experience shows that this benevolent and seemingly simple task is in fact a very complex and difficult project that very few can manage successfully and without lots of inconsistencies. For instance, Zorin, mFatOS and UberStudent are all Ubuntu modifications, but neither managed to quite beat the original. You gain a handful of improvements, in some cases, massive improvements, but each new layer of functionality adds problems and bugs that small teams with virtually no QA behind their projects cannot really manage that well.
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Jolicloud comes with enough applications out of the box to satisfy the vast majority of users. The most important is, of course, the browser. Jolicloud offers you three to choose from. Chromium, by the way, is the default.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Since that time, Nokia has been heralding Maemo and then MeeGo as the future of its phone business, and in doing so have put significant faith in the open source universe.
What Nokia really needs right now is a killer smartphone OS–n phones it’s selling at this very moment, during this holiday season, which is sure to go down in history as being the defining moment for smartphone sales. The revolution starts here, but Nokia isn’t 100 percent present.
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Android
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Now that front-facing cameras are all the rage, there is a bit more than just video conferencing that they can be useful for. A promising and interesting use of the now common hardware is biometric authentication, through eye and/or facial scanning as a mean to unlock a device or private files stored on the device. Blue Planet Apps has been working away on their own BioLock, and from the latest demo video they have offered up, it is coming along quite nicely.
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ITG Investment Research analyst Matthew Goodman has noted this week that Android has quickly become the top selling smartphone OS on Verizon’s network, far outpacing RIM’s BlackBerry.
In October of 2009, RIM BlackBerries controlled a full 93 percent of Verizon’s smartphone sales, with Windows Mobile controlling the rest.
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fring is rolling out its network-optimized DVQ mobile video calling technology. DVQ technology is compatible with all mobile data bearers: 3G, 4G, WIMax and WiFi.
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We do utilize some commercial software but there is often the alternative choice of utilizing open source software, preferably open source software that implements an open standard. Open source software projects often originate as a labor of love by software developers who are tired of seeing a shared problem solved over and over again in one off solutions, or perhaps they realize that they can offer a more simple and elegant alternative to a commercial product. The great thing about a good open source project that solves a shared challenge is that it develops it’s own momentum and it is sustained for a long time by a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. At Netflix we jumped on for the ride a long time ago and we have benefited enormously from the virtuous cycles of actively evolving open source projects. We benefit from the continuous improvements provided by the community of contributors outside of Netflix. We also benefit by contributing back the changes we make to the projects. By sharing our bug fixes and new features back out into the community, the community then in turn continues to improve upon bug fixes and new features that originated at Netflix and then we complete the cycle by bring those improvements back into Netflix.
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It seems strange. Considering the great successes of Gnome, KDE, Eclipse, and many other groups, it is curious that Symbian was not able to follow along the same path. I have always been a great believer in OSS consortia, because I think that the sharing of research and development is a main strength of the open source model, and I think that consortia are among the best ways to implement R&D sharing efficiently.
However, to work well, Consortia need to provide benefits in terms of efficiency or visibility to all the actors that participate in them, not only to the original developer group. For Nokia, we know that one of the reasons to open up Symbian was to reduce the porting effort. As Eric Raymond reports, “they did a cost analysis and concluded they couldn’t afford the engineering hours needed to port Symbian to all the hardware they needed to support. (I had this straight from a Symbian executive, face-to-face, around 2002).”
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To ensure the data to be free and to avoid abuse of commercial providers we have several security mechanisms. Beside of that all the data are licensed and published using the therms of the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL).
This license gives users the possibility to use data out of the database with no need to get the permission from the originator. So for these data in every case the conditions of the GNU FDL are valid. A “document” according to the definitions of this license is a single data set out of the database (not the database structure and organisation itself).
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About 56% of our office now uses OpenOffice for all their documents.
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One of the more interesting revelations to come out from the (imminently decided upon) Sergey Aleynikov trial is that Goldman Sachs’ code may not even have been worth stealing.
Benjamin Goldberg, an associate professor in New York University’s computer science department, testified that the code Aleynikov took contained “lots of open source software”.
Or, as Aleynikov’s lawyer Kevin Marino said: “The general common notion that Goldman Sachs is the New York Yankees and Goldman’s systems are the best ain’t necessarily so.”
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Current agenda items:
* Support models and how to organise this on an international basis
* Bylaws State of Affairs
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I just did a tweet saying that I thought the number of news stories about open source seems to have slowed down quite a bit in the last month or so, outside of the major projects and companies. Indeed, the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 was big news.
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Events
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What will be the outcome of 68% of all human beings relying on a communication system that is insecure, unconfidential and closed to inspection and understanding? GSM looks like a disaster waiting to happen; watch this space!
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Yesterday we had the last LUG meet for this year, and the last in this current location (from next month we need another place, still looking for it). One above another, it was a good one.
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RMS recently called our attention to the Homeland Security Cyber and Physical Infrastructure Protection Act of 2010. This bill, currently being considered in a House subcommittee, has the potential to threaten free software.
Its loose wording would allow bad measures like requiring companies, institutions, or even just major Web sites, to use specific proprietary software.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The reason you still see the old menu inside the window is that for testing developers will have both running so they can compare them side to side.
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In Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, Firefox and Thunderbird will finally get an AppMenu (global menu). The above screenshot shows the initial work on this done by Chris Coulson.
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Mozilla on Thursday patched 13 vulnerabilities in Firefox, including a re-patch for a bug that was thought quashed in March 2010.
Eleven of the 13 were rated “critical,” the threat level representing bugs that hackers could conceivably use to hijack a system or infect it with malware. Of the two remaining vulnerabilities, one was labeled “high” and the second was tagged as “moderate.”
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Oracle
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Of course, we had hoped that our previous blog post would have spun up more support, but being the pragmatists that we are, we also knew that the other EC members were being seriously pressured by Oracle to vote YES, and so we held out little hope. We also hoped for a better response from Oracle, but what we got was basically self-serving lip-service with what is most likely the funniest and yet most inaccurate line yet in the whole ordeal:
“Oracle provides TCK licenses under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms consistent with its obligations under the JSPA.”
If that little nugget doesn’t show that Accuracy and Oracle don’t mix, I don’t know what will.
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Oracle is expected to launch the general-availability version of MySQL 5.5 during a webcast event on Wednesday, December 15.
The event will be hosted by Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL development, and Rob Young, senior MySQL product manager, who will update attendees on the latest developments with the open-source database.
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CMS
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More and more, I see large organizations standardize on Drupal. Drupal’s low-cost entry point and open, modular architecture provides the perfect foundation. Drupal is one of the few solutions that can scale from very small to extremely large, and has the depth and breadth of functionality to support thousands of different use cases. Drupal sites can span a wide range of functionality; from blogs, to marketing microsites, social business community sites, corporate intranets, e-commerce sites and more. There are incredible success stories for each of these use cases already. Plus, we’ve now reached a point where many open source content management systems outperform proprietary solutions on technical superiority and pace of innovation. Drupal is in a very unique position.
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Telenet, the largest provider of broadband cable services in Belgium, wants happy customers, and customers are happy when they can solve any problems or answer any questions concerning a company’s products on their own, or by simply calling a friendly helpful client advisor.
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Business
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I can’t imagine a world in which compromise and collaboration could be more important than in an open source business model. The model itself opens a Pandora’s Box of issues that create a minefield that must be navigated on a daily basis and makes those concepts critical to success. Think, for an instance, about a world in which one or many of the possible points of differentiation are freely shared—and some even given away—without condition to parties whose interests are naturally misaligned with yours. The hope is through sharing that the collective community or society will be better served.
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My suggestions to solve these three challenges are rather simplistic. Disavow those community members who do not take their responsibility seriously. Continue to educate the lawmakers of the world about the changes and challenges that the current environment presents to true innovation and collaboration. And finally, be wary of simply following the crowd, because true leadership isn’t about only doing what is popular. It is about way more than that. But those are mine, and quite frankly I’m more interested in listening to yours, so please let me know what you think. To be continued…
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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I’ve just release a new version of OMNewRotate (source, it’s OpenPGP signature, an ipkg tested against FSO M4.1 and it’s OpenPGP signature).
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Licensing
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I often ask questions and answer them on Stackoverflow – an Open site available to anyone to who has programming questions. It’s so successful that over about 2-3 years it has had over 1MILLION questions. Yes, one million. That’s a wonderful example of crowdsourcing meeting a need.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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A team of researchers from MIT, Cornell University and University College London have combined to utilize one of the world’s largest telecommunications records to visualise calls made between individual towns and cities, indicating how tightly connected some of them are.
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Last week, an article in the Wall Street Journal talked about the Open Data Partnership, which “will allow consumers to edit the interests, demographics and other profile information collected about them. It also will allow people to choose to not be tracked at all.” The article goes on to discuss data mining and privacy issues, which are hot topics in today’s digital world, where we all wonder just how much of our personal data is out there and how it’s being used. These are valid concerns being talked about in other, more appropriate fora. I, however, would like to address my personal pet peeve about the dilution of the term open data.
The Open Knowledge Definition says it this way, “A piece of content or data is open if you are free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.” Generally, this means that the data should be released in a format that is free of royalties and other IP restrictions. The problem is that an increasing number of people are using the term open data to mean publicly available data.
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Programming
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Drew Conway and John Myles White of the website Dataists decided to try ranking programming languages using a new system: the size of the community and the number of projects. In Conway’s blog post about the results, he admits that there’s no perfect way to find data about either measure. He and Myles settled on using the number of questions in StackOverflow as a measure of the community and the number of projects in Github as a measure of the number of projects.
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Standards/Consortia
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Two brothers who say police unlawfully seized more than $190,000 from them during a traffic stop had been under surveillance and were suspected of drug-dealing, a lawyer for the city of Aurora said today during a court hearing.
Though neither Jose nor Jesus Martinez is charged with a crime, authorities are seeking forfeiture of $190,040 found in Jesus’ truck when he was stopped by an Aurora police officer on Oct. 18.
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Now it’s clear Amazon, Paypal and others will disconnect their customers without many questions asked, perhaps it’s time to explore other approaches to networked infrastructure. The field is immature, but there are exciting experiments in progress.
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That’s right. MasterCard and Visa reportedly stopped transactions for those wishing to donate money to WikiLeaks, due to a “technicality”. But anyone who wants to do some Christmas shopping and buy “Klan Novelties” like this lovely little ceramic tchotchke, can visit the official Ku Klux Klan web site and put it on their credit card.
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Andy Coulson, the prime minister’s director of communications, will not face prosecution over allegations he knew of phone hacking while he was editor of the News of the World, it was announced today.
The Crown Prosecution Service announced the decision after spending the last four weeks studying material from a renewed Scotland Yard investigation into the claims.
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Germany and France pledged on Friday to better align their tax and labor policies to foster convergence in the euro zone, but rejected calls for an increase in the bloc’s rescue fund and joint sovereign bonds.
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Investigation opens into claims of ‘transfer market’ defections as Italian PM’s party faces censure motions in parliament
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The wikileaks saga gives the lie to the claim of United States omnipotence over the naming and numbering system via ICANN. Even assuming the United States could order ICANN (through its contractual arrangements and de facto control) to shut down all wikileaks sites (something that is far from obvious), ICANN could not follow through because its main leverage over unwanted wikileaks websites is its threat to de-list top-level domain names where the wikileaks sites appear. It is doubtful that ICANN could make that threat credibly for many reasons, including (a) the sites are shifting across top-level domains too quickly, (b) ICANN is not going to shut down a top-level domain to get at a handful of sites, and (c) alternative and perhaps root-splitting DNS alternatives might arise if it did.
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On Dec. 2, Jeremy Marks, a Verdugo Hills High School special education student, was offered a new plea offer by the L.A. County District Attorney: If he pled guilty to charges of obstructing an officer, resisting arrest, criminal threats and “attempted lynching,” he’d serve only 32 months in prison.
That actually was an improvement from the previous offer made to the young, black high schooler — seven years in prison.
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The rot set in back in the 19th century, when the US legal system began recognizing corporations as de facto people. Fast forward past the collapse of the ancien regime, and into modern second-wave colonialism: once the USA grabbed the mantle of global hegemon from the bankrupt British empire in 1945, they naturally exported their corporate model worldwide, as US diplomatic (and military) muscle was used to promote access to markets on behalf of US corporations.
Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)
Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.
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I’m still refining my thoughts on a Bill of Rights in Cyberspace — the latest version in preparation for tomorrow’s PDF symposium on WIkileaks and transparency. The idea is to have principles we can point to when dealing with such events as Wikileaks, Google/Verizon, Google/China, and so on.
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Amazon has increased the maximum object size on its S3 online storage service to 5 terabytes. Previously, S3 users were forced to store large files in chunks no larger than about 5 gigabytes.
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In diplomatic cables released by the whistle blowing website Wikileaks on Friday, it is revealed that the United States embassy in Rangoon suspects the North Korean and Burmese military are participating in “covert military or military-industrial” activities. In the cables dating back as early as January 2004, the embassy reports the military activities could include the construction of a nuclear reactor in or near Minbu, along with “SAM missiles” and an underground facility with as many as 300 North Korean military personnel assisting the Burmese military in the construction. Burma is primarily controlled by its military.
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For the past three hundred years, the relationship between the press and the state has been straightforward: the press tries to publish, the state uses its various mechanisms to thwart those efforts. This has produced a cat-and-mouse steady-state, a balance where selection pressures kept the press tamed and the state – in many circumstances – somewhat accountable to the governed. There are, as always, exceptions.
In the last few months, the press has become hyperconnected, using that hyperconnectivity to pierce the veil of secrecy which surrounds the state; using the means available to it to hyperdistribute those secrets. The press has become hyperempowered, an actor unlike anything ever experienced before.
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According to the Guardian, there are more than 200 million children working throughout the world — and of these, roughly one in 12 is in a hazardous job such as mining. “Not only is child labour wrong, but the existence of child labour within a company’s value chain can have significant impacts on reputation and profits and it is critical that companies undertake stringent monitoring of all suppliers,” principal analyst Monique Bianchi is quoted as saying on the Maplecroft website.
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A new study has identified the key emerging economies that supply the world with manufactured goods and natural resources, and that are fueling the global economic recovery, as the countries with the worst record of underage workers within their labour markets.
The Child Labour Index and map, produced by global risks advisory firm Maplecroft, rates 68 countries as ‘extreme risk’ with Bangladesh, China, India, Nigeria and Pakistan amongst those with the most widespread abuses of child workers.
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“Revenge of the Electric Car” is a new documentary from director Chris Paine, who also directed “Who Killed the Electric Car.” The new film, coming in Spring 2011, focuses on the dramatic resurgence of the electric car around the world, “tracks the electrifying race to challenge the age of gasoline,” according to its promoters.
Quoting from the introduction to its trailer on YouTube…
“In 2006, as many as 5,000 modern electric cars were destroyed by the major car companies that built them.
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Science
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A historic downward shift in U.S. research efficiency is described in a new report on science publication trends, showing that while funding rose, the quantity of research yielded, measured by an analysis of published scientific papers, fell
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Veiled beneath the Persian Gulf, a once-fertile landmass may have supported some of the earliest humans outside Africa some 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, a new review of research suggests.
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Security
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A 30-year-old IT worker at a Florida-based health centre was this week sentenced to 19 months in a US federal prison for hacking – and then locking – her former employer’s IT systems.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Anybody got the keys to Police Chief Bill Blair’s handcuffs?
Because Toronto’s top cop — indisputably the most powerful municipal law enforcement official in Canada — has got a bad case of the shackles.
Five officers identified by late Wednesday afternoon as cop-on-civilian combatants during the G20 Summit protests and there’s apparently precious little Blair can do about it.
Can’t fire ’em. Can’t suspend ’em without pay, pending a disciplinary hearing. Can’t compel them — if designated by the Special Investigations Unit as subject officers, which hasn’t happened yet with this quintet — to come forth for interviewing by the independent agency.
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When he is finally allowed up off the ground after being stomped and pummeled by cops, Adam Nobody appears to have suffered no significant facial injuries — at least none that show.
There isn’t any blood, nary evidence of wounds, and the nose — which Nobody suspects was snapped during that pile-on melee — is exactly where it’s supposed to be.
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Ontario Ombudsman André Marin today issued a brief additional statement about his special report Caught in the Act. The statement addresses issues and questions surrounding the use of police powers granted by the province’s enactment of Regulation 233/10 under the Public Works Protection Act.
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The Special Investigations Unit has the name of the officer who used a baton to hit a G20 protester, as well as those of 13 other officers who were present or nearby at the time.
The police watchdog is still gathering information and tracking down civilian witnesses, said spokesman Frank Phillips.
By Thursday, investigators also identified one civilian witness, armed with a video camera, for whom they had made a public plea earlier this week.
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On Dec. 9, 2010, Haaretz, one of Israel’s top newspapers and news sources, reported that the United States would allocate some $205 million for something called an “Iron Dome anti-rocket system.” As a reward, then, for the non-stop building of settlements, Israel was showered with weapons by the U.S., thanks mostly to the Pro-Israel lobby, which has remained a huge obstacle in solving the Israel-Palestine conflict from time immemorial to begin with.
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Obviously it is deplorable on its own terms that the Chinese government continues to imprison the winner, Liu Xiaobo (left, from Reuters); that it will not allow his wife or other family members or representatives to attend; that it is pressuring so many other countries to boycott the event; and that it is preparing to block news coverage of the award within China. The Chinese central authorities no doubt intend all these as demonstrations of strength. In the rest of the world’s eyes, of course, there could be no more dramatic demonstration of weakness and insecurity. As would have been the case if the U.S. government had kept Martin Luther King in prison after his Nobel Peace Prize, blocked all coverage of his award, kept his family under house arrest, pressured other countries not to go to Oslo, etc. And as it was when South Africa jailed Nelson Mandela.
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WikiLeaks, which publishes anonymous leaks of secret material (most recently 250,000 previously secret US embassy cables) still has a trick up its sleeve. In the last few days its sources of funding have been gradually cut off. MasterCard, PayPal and now Visa have all suspended payments to the organsation and founder Julian Assange has been remanded in custody in London without bail (so far).
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Despite being humiliated by Ontario’s top watchdog for a state of “martial law” that in some cases led to unacceptable strip searches and police beatings, Chief Bill Blair appears to be either a provincial government fall guy or someone in the sweet spot where no one above him has the courage to sanction him.
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Ordinary people may be able to make such comments as calling on Presidents to assassinate people as a “joke,” but people with strong ties to a sitting government should not be making such statements on news magazine programs that are being broadcast across Canadian’s national television broadcaster, CBC.
No doubt Mr. Flanagan was on the program in question because of his strong ties to the Canadian government.
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Political fallout over the G20 summit in Toronto will not make York Regional Police less likely to lend a hand in other jurisdictions during major events, the force’s deputy chief said.
About 400 York officers were deployed to Toronto sites, including the fence that separated demonstrators from world leaders and a detention centre, during the June summit.
York police often assist during high-profile events in Toronto. For example, local officers helped police large-scale protests by the Tamil-Canadian community in 2009.
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The mother of a 12-year-old boy has criticised Thames Valley police for taking her son out of lessons because he was planning to picket David Cameron’s constituency office today.
Nicky Wishart, a pupil at Bartholomew School, Eynsham, Oxfordshire, organised the event on Facebook to highlight the plight of his youth centre, which is due to close in March next year due to budget cuts.
The protest, which was due to take place today, has attracted over 130 people on Facebook, most of whom are children who use youth centres in Cameron’s constituency, Witney.
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According to Fox News, the United States Navy has been developing a weapon called the railgun that has cost $211 million since 2005.
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This week, Senators Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein engaged in acts of serious aggression against their own constituents, and the American people in general. They both invoked the 1917 Espionage Act and urged its use in going after Julian Assange. For good measure, Lieberman extended his invocation of the Espionage Act to include a call to use it to investigate the New York Times, which published WikiLeaks’ diplomatic cables. Reports yesterday suggest that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder may seek to invoke the Espionage Act against Assange.
These two Senators, and the rest of the Congressional and White House leadership who are coming forward in support of this appalling development, are cynically counting on Americans’ ignorance of their own history — an ignorance that is stoked and manipulated by those who wish to strip rights and freedoms from the American people. They are manipulatively counting on Americans to have no knowledge or memory of the dark history of the Espionage Act — a history that should alert us all at once to the fact that this Act has only ever been used — was designed deliberately to be used — specifically and viciously to silence people like you and me.
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In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a “war of perception . . . conducted continuously using the news media”. What really matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where “the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences”. Reading this, I was reminded of the Venezuelan general who led a coup against the democratic government in 2002. “We had a secret weapon,” he boasted. “We had the media, especially TV. You got to have the media.”
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Cablegate
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Julian Assange has been labelled one of the most dangerous men on earth. With the most comprehensive archive of background reports in the world, we get right inside the guarded world of the whistle-blower.
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The United States has quietly asked allies like Yemen and Pakistan for some extraordinary favors in its war on terrorism. Is it really so terrible if WikiLeaks forces them to explain those demands?
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JULIA Gillard is facing a revolt from MPs in her left-wing parliamentary faction, enraged at the treatment of Julian Assange.
The MPs are demanding the government stop treating Mr Assange as a criminal and protect his rights as an Australian citizen and whistleblower.
A large number of MPs have spoken to The Weekend Australian to express grave concerns at the language ministers and the Prime Minister are using in relation to Mr Assange.
Laurie Ferguson, a friend and factional colleague of Ms Gillard who was dumped as parliamentary secretary for multicultural affairs and settlement services, told The Weekend Australian the government had overreacted to the WikiLeaks release of secret US documents. He said the information that had been released was crucial to democracy and exposing the truth.
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It’s too late to stop WikiLeaks from publishing thousands more classified documents, nabbed from the Pentagon’s secret network.
But the U.S. military is telling its troops to stop using CDs, DVDs, thumb drives and every other form of removable media — or risk a court martial.
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AMERICA’S reaction to WikiLeaks’ recent trickle of confidential diplomatic messages has not improved its reputation in Europe, at least according to this article by Steven Erlanger in the New York Times. Mr Erlanger offers an entertaining run-down of sharply critical opinions from pundits and politicos across the pond. Their theme, as Mr Erlanger puts it in his lede, is that “Washington’s fierce reaction to the flood of secret diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks displays imperial arrogance and hypocrisy, indicating a post-9/11 obsession with secrecy that contradicts American principles”.
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When asked about the (idiotic) attack by protesters on the car carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, he praised the “restraint” of the firearms officers who were there.
The implication appeared to be that, but for this “restraint”, the protesters would have quite properly been shot dead. The Commissioner furthermore described the restraint of his officers generally, not by reference to the officers following training, policies and procedures, but in terms which meant he could commend the officers’ moral qualities.
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The WikiLeaks plus Manning story has truly revealed that the US government will do anything necessary to silence its critics, legally or illegally. The way in which it is orchestrating a highly questionable international effort against both WikiLeaks and Julian Assange is despicable. There exists a sharp divide between those who believe government secrets should always be protected at all costs and those who believe that secrecy in government exists only to conceal official misbehavior. Obviously there is a middle ground hidden somewhere between the two, but those who favor the narrative that accepts that there is a nefarious government in Washington ruthlessly manipulating a world empire have pretty much gotten it right. The documents and the Obama Administration behavior together tell the tale.
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The argument I’m making in the Times piece rests on three premises:
a) WikiLeaks, at least in its post-Cablegate reincarnation, has two major assets: an easily recognizable brand and an extensive network of contacts in the media
b) If the Cablegate release ends up having significant global repercussions — resignations of politicians, alterations in the behavior of governments and corporations — this is bound to encourage more people to take risks and start leaking
c) The buzz generated by the Cablegate makes it clear that WikiLeaks is only as effective as their media partners: they are the ones screening the cables, identifying narrative threads, redacting the names, and, most importantly, embarrassing the parties involved.
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The pope is responsible for the Vatican’s growing hostility towards Turkey joining the EU, previously secret cables sent from the US embassy to the Holy See in Rome claim.
In 2004 Cardinal Ratzinger, the future pope, spoke out against letting a Muslim state join, although at the time the Vatican was formally neutral on the question.
The Vatican’s acting foreign minister, Monsignor Pietro Parolin, responded by telling US diplomats that Ratzinger’s comments were his own rather than the official Vatican position.
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The Vatican refused to allow its officials to testify before an Irish commission investigating the clerical abuse of children and was angered when they were summoned from Rome, US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks reveal.
Requests for information from the 2009 Murphy commission into sexual and physical abuse by clergy “offended many in the Vatican” who felt that the Irish government had “failed to respect and protect Vatican sovereignty during the investigations”, a cable says.
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I go to log into my business account, and it’s locked. The girl on the phone told me it’s because my account handles a large amount of money (it’s a biz account), I recently sent a lot of money ($4000) overseas, and I also sent money to wikileaks. My account is being investigated for illegal activities and I have to account for what the money was used for. They want invoices and such.
I sweep my money out of there daily because paypal sucks balls, so I am only out $30. We sure are heading towards an orwellian future, real fucking fast.
–update–
I’ve been blacklisted as well. “This account has been permanently locked. All information associated with this account has been blocked from the PayPal system and cannot be registered with another account.”
–update2– I will record my conversation on monday, paypal has no support on the weekend. Billion dollar company with no weekend phone support.
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The State Department denied a report today that it contacted the online money transfer service PayPal and asked them to cut ties with WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, who remains behind bars in the United Kingdom.
“It is not true,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told The Cable. “We have not been in touch with PayPal.”
Osama Bedier, vice president at PayPal, told an audience Wednesday at Paris’ tech conference Le Web’10 that PayPal had shut down its business with WikiLeaks, which used the electronic money transfer service to collect donations, at the request of the State Department.
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What do the leaks reveal? One opinion: WikiLeaks Shows the Skills of U.S. Diplomats. So what’s the real furor about? I’d say control.
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I’ve just cancelled my Paypal account because I can’t agree with their actions regarding #Wikileaks. They should not have prevented them from getting donations, either by harassing them or harassing other customers who donated (if true).
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One of the most interesting aspects of the WikiLeaks controversy is the light it has shed on the providers of cloud computing. One after another they have fallen over like dominoes when the going got rough. First, some of the ISPs hosting WikiLeaks caved in; then EveryDNS, the company that mapped its domain names (eg wikileaks.org) on to machine addresses, dropped it; then Amazon, which had enough computer power and bandwidth to resist even the most determined cyber-attacks, took it off its computers; then PayPal and later Mastercard, the online conduits for donations, cancelled its accounts. The rationalisations these outfits gave for dropping WikiLeaks had a common theme, namely that it had violated the terms and conditions under which the terminated services had been provided.
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Prominent French newspaper Libération is now hosting a WikiLeaks mirror at http://wikileaks.liberation.fr . Please find below a translation of the media group’s statement:
‘We have chosen to help prevent the asphyxiation of WikiLeaks at a time when governments and companies try to block its operation without even a legal order. Like thousands of other sites, Libération.fr decided to participate in the support movement that is being put into place on the internet, replicating WikiLeaks content fully. These sites, called mirrors, can be hosted by anyone who has server space available. This is what we did, in order to prevent the disappearance from the public record of WikiLeaks documents selected with partner media organizations. We have therefore opened this site: wikileaks.liberation.fr’
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BIG crimes deserve tough responses.
[...]
But calibrating that response raises questions of principle, practice and priority. Businesses will go their own way. Some, such as PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, which handled donations to WikiLeaks, and Amazon, which provided web-hosting services, have dumped it as a customer in response to American outrage. More may follow. They risk attacks from its fans, just as those that refuse face hostility from their customers in America. Too bad: business is full of hard choices.
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The arrest of enigmatic Wikileaks founder Julian Assange indicates a problem with democracy, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.
“If they have a full democracy, why have they hidden mister Assange away in prison? Is that what democracy is?” the premier said at a briefing with his French counterpart Francois Fillon.
“In Russian villages they say `some people`s cows can moo, but yours should keep quiet.` So I would like to shoot the puck back at our American colleagues,” Putin added.
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A teenager was arrested yesterday on suspicion of being involved with the Anonymous’ Operation Payback. The operation orchestrated DDoS attacks on anti-piracy targets in the last months, and more recently against those who obstructed Wikileaks’ work. Sources have informed TorrentFreak that the arrestee is one of the IRC-operators of Anonymous, known under the nickname Jeroenz0r.
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First they came for the hackers.
But I never did anything illegal with my computer,
so I didn’t speak up.
Then they came for the pornographers.
But I thought there was too much smut on the Internet anyway,
so I didn’t speak up
[...]
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2600: The Hacker Quarterly, has published a public statement opposing the Anonymous denial-of-service attacks on the services that abetted the censorship of Wikileaks. 2600′s position is that the inexcusable moral cowardice of Visa and Mastercard and PayPal, etc, do not justify the use of brute force. Additionally, 2600 says that DDoS attacks are tactically unsound, as they create sympathy for these companies, and are used as a pretense for more attacks on Internet freedom
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WIKILEAKS chief Julian Assange was in a segregation unit of a London jail for his own safety today as new secret US diplomatic cables were made public.
The 39-year-old Australian has been transferred from the main section of Wandsworth prison to an isolation unit, Jennifer Robinson, one of his legal team, said Friday.
“The prison authorities are doing it for his own safety, presumably,” she told AFP.
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John Bolton, former U.N. Ambassador and President of the Presidium of the Supreme Stacheviet, has an opinion on Wikileaks! It is quite a predictable one, but his editorial in The Guardian offers this deathless, Thiessenesque proposition:
The Pentagon’s cyber-warriors need target practice in this new form of combat, and they could long ago have practised by obliterating WikiLeaks’ electrons.
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What would happen to WikiLeaks pieces once they are written? One option is for WikiLeaks to become something like ProPublica and either try to syndicate their articles to whatever media would take them or strike exclusive deals with select few media partners. This won’t be terribly profitable and no U.S. foundation would want to touch WikiLeaks for a very long time (private donors, on the other hand, are a different case; there are plenty of rich oddballs like Peter Thiel who may find the idea of funding WikiLeaks very appealing — too bad he won’t be able to use PayPal to wire his dues though). On the other hand, the WikiLeaks brand right now may be strong enough for them to run on donations for quite some time — this seems to work with Wikipedia (but the latter do receive a lot of non-donations money as well).
As the above should have made obvious by now, I clearly don’t think that the story of WikiLeaks is nearing its end with the full release of all the cables. I know for a fact that Assange has been thinking about the kind of relationship that WikiLeaks needs to have with their media partners for years. I suspect his thinking has evolved quite a bit this year, not least because WikiLeaks has become a media’s darling after spending a few years in relative obscurity.
Whatever strategy Assange chooses to pursue, I don’t think it’s possible to get the future of WikiLeaks right without first addressing the media relationship piece of the puzzle.
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Lawyers for Julian Assange expect the United States to file spying charges against the Wikileaks frontman soon.
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2600 Magazine, a quarterly journal for the hacker community that has published since 1984, is speaking out against numerous media reports that hackers are responsible for a spate of attacks on numerous e-commerce corporations as part of the ongoing Wikileaks controversy.
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Some things truly haven’t been seen before. WikiLeaks might be one of them.
It’s hard to believe that the founding fathers could have ever imagined the possibilities of the Internet or a journalist like Julian Assange when they crafted the First Amendment.
If they were with us today they might well say they knew publishers they despised as much as some of our leaders today apparently do the editor-in-chief of the notorious website.
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Readers of this blog will know we have been following the whole Wikileaks saga this week, and my intial annoyance with Wikileaks for (in my view) being too “gung ho” (see here) has been counterbalanced with an annoyance at the “chattering classes” – the Media and Politicians – in their attempts to misinform, misreport, and muzzle by veiled threat rather than legal action (because that they would likely lose a court case).
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WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical.
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Newly released U.S. diplomatic cables indicate that Ireland caved in to Vatican pressure to grant immunity to church officials in the government probe of decades of sex abuse by Irish clergy in the predominantly Catholic nation.
That the Holy See used its diplomatic immunity status as a tiny-city state to try to thwart Ireland’s government-led probe has long been known. But the WikiLeaks cables, published by Britain’s The Guardian newspaper on Saturday, contain delicate, behind-the-scenes diplomatic assessments of the highly charged situation.
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Some will doubtless wonder if President Obama is using this valuable intel to implement a sinister socialist sandwich agenda of his own.
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LIFE without Julian Assange began for WikiLeaks yesterday.
The website’s remaining staff and volunteers grappled with the absence of the Australian “editor-in-chief” who serves as its public face and private leader.
Mr Assange’s lawyers were allowed just a three-minute phone call to him in Wandsworth Prison, in south London, yesterday and he has no internet or phone access to his colleagues on the world’s most controversial website.
The group confirmed yesterday that Icelandic television journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson had taken over as WikiLeaks’ temporary leader and main spokesman, while other members of the secretive group began an organisation revamp and change of work locations to cope with Mr Assange’s detention.
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A Dig trace on wikileaks.org now returns an IP Address of 208.165.55.20, which is an address a Dynadot web host(It should be noted that the actual Datacenter provider is Silicon Valley Web Hosting, which is located in Southern California). The Dynadot web host, however, is not actually hosting the wikileaks web site; it’s been configured to redirect requests for wikileaks.org to mirror.wikileaks.info, which is actually being hosted by Heihachi LTD in Russia. This actually the same hosting provider that was hosting anonops.net(Operation Payback) before it was shut down yesterday.
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In previous posts, I dismissed WikiLeaks as not such a big deal. Well, that was obviously wrong. I argued that everybody already knew that – for example – Nicolas Sarkozy is vain or Russia is a brutal and corrupt place, so the cables did not add much to the sum of human knowledge.
But that was wrong on two counts. First, there is a difference between an idea being conventional wisdom in the media, and spelled out in a diplomatic cable – both in terms of authority and in terms of political impact. You can see that in the angry reactions to the leaks from everybody from Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to Kevin Rudd, the foreign minister of Australia. (Apparently Rudd is a “mistake-prone control freak”.) Second, with the arrest of Julian Assange on dubious-sounding sexual assault charges – and now the attack on Mastercard’s web-site, apparently by Assange supporters, the whole thing is shaping up into an unpredictable conflict between western governments and internet-based anarchists.And, as more and more material is released, there are some genuine surprises emerging.
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Anonymous, who have been on a week long sprint/spree to paralyze website sites like Mastercard and Paypal, are often described in the news as a “group” with “members.” This is usually followed by a series of prolonged qualifications and caveats because many characteristics we usually associate with groups don’t seem to apply comfortably with Anonymous: there are no leaders, anyone can seemingly join, and participants are spread across the globe, although many of them can be found on any number of Internet Relay Chat Channels where they discuss strategy, plan attacks, crack jokes, and often pose critical commentary on the unfolding events they have just engendered. Earlier this week, The Economist listened in on the IRC channels, opening a fascinating window into the order behind the seeming chaos of Anonymous and providing a sense of how the Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks are coordinated by a trusted group of Ops who leverage the labor of thousands of other contributors.
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There was a great turn out yesterday. We met at the State Library in front of the statue of the guy who hunted Ned Kelly. I’m not sure it that’s ironic or fitting.
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Now in a rare interview, a friend of Julian Assange has described what he was like in the years before WikiLeaks.
He was apparently a brilliant, socially awkward crusader, a ‘hard-core geek’ who would rather interact with a machine than a person but who was also determined to change the world, reports News.com.au.
Assange was described as a humanist, a man who serves no masters, a Renaissance man with 21st-century tools at his disposal, who ‘decided early on that the world is not as fair a place as it could be, but that Internet provides a way of creating a more level playing field in terms of justice’.
When asked about Assange’s political beliefs, the friend said he flirted with the Left but became disillusioned.
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The net is abuzz with a rumor claiming that the CIA is behind a Wikileaks mirror that was hosted at http://wikileaks.psytek.net. This rumor lacked any real evidence, yet was reported by many in the hacker/hacktivist community as fact.
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IT WAS 2pm in central Westminster Magistrates Court No. 6, a modern chamber, done in blond wood, looking curiously Scandinavian in style, and the world’s press were so focused on celebrities such as John Pilger and Jemima Khan crowded behind the defence desk, that few noticed Julian Assange slip into the room. Neatly dressed, more solid than he appears on screen, his white hair neatly clipped, he took his seat behind the semi-circular glass screen.
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I have been following the unfolding of events related to the latest Wikileaks release with growing fascination. I am not going to comment here on the political implications of the cables’ contents – others have done so elsewhere, and will continue to do so, far better than I ever could. What I am going to comment on is the debate around Wikileaks, and a trend I have observed within that debate that I find very concerning.
[...]
You think that Wikileaks was wrong to publish confidential documents that might put innocent individuals at risk? Then the government is right to do “whatever it takes” to stop Wikileaks, due process is a luxury we cannot afford in the face of this (or any) crisis, and Julian Assange should have been assassinated a long time ago.
Of course I am exaggerating to some degree, but these are the general lines along which much of the discussion seems to happen. I have been bothered by this for the last few days, and decided to write this article to collect my thoughts, and perhaps even contribute to a more differentiated discussion. Please note this is in many ways a brain-dump, and not an attempt at a final answer in any way (hence the title).
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The United States has never used the law to charge a recipient who has published classified information. To date, the only charges against WikiLeaks or Assange are two counts of sexual assault by two Swedish women.
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Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, has called for Julian Assange’s prosecution, despite the general consensus that he hasn’t actually committed any American crime. Mitch McConnell, a Republican, has a slightly clearer-eyed view; he wants the law changed so that Assange can be prosecuted as a terrorist. Joe Lieberman wants a criminal investigation of not just Assange but also the New York Times.
What exactly do they hope to accomplish? Do they think that if they do somehow manage to convict Assange—who, remember, was only the publisher, not the leaker—they will have eliminated the threat of Internet information dissemination forever? Don’t they realize that with every boneheaded speech and op-ed, they ratchet up the free publicity and do Wikileaks a huge favor, when a dignified silence plus a few veiled threats would have been far more effective? Can they really be so stupid?
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Police moved WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange to the segregation unit of a London jail for his safety, a lawyer said Friday as new cables showed the U.S. suspects Myanmar has a secret nuclear program.
The 39-year-old Australian has been transferred from the main section of Wandsworth prison to an isolation unit, said Jennifer Robinson, one of his legal team.
“The prison authorities are doing it for his own safety, presumably,” she said.
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Asked on the night of September 11, 2001 what the terrorist attacks meant for U.S.-Israel relations, Benjamin Netanyahu, the then former prime minister, tactlessly but accurately replied, “It’s very good.” And on the day after WikiLeaks’ publication of U.S. diplomatic cables, Netanyahu “strode” into a press conference at the Israeli Journalists Association, looking “undoubtedly delighted” with the group’s latest embarrassment of U.S. President Barack Obama.
“Thanks to WikiLeaks,” Aluf Benn wrote in Haaretz, “there is now no fear Washington will exert heavy pressure on Israel to freeze settlement construction or to accelerate negotiations on a withdrawal from the territories.” Instead, also courtesy of WikiLeaks, the world’s attention had been shifted exactly where a “vindicated” Netanyahu wanted it – toward Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons programme.
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Since he first landed in a London jail upon his arrest on Tuesday, the only thing that WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange has been requesting is access to a computer.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will remain in a London prison until a British court takes up a Swedish request for extradition for questioning on sexual crime allegations. An international group of former intelligence officers and ex-government officials have released a statement in support of Assange. We speak to one of the signatories, Daniel Ellsberg, the famous whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War in 1971. “If I released the Pentagon Papers today, the same rhetoric and the same calls would be made about me,” Ellsberg says. “I would be called not only a traitor—which I was then, which was false and slanderous—but I would be called a terrorist… Assange and Bradley Manning are no more terrorists than I am.” [includes rush transcript]
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Of all the ministers and politicians parading the world stage in Cancún last week, President Evo Morales of Bolivia knows best the impact of a theatrical entrance. His entourage includes 15 colourfully dressed, bowler-hatted indigenous Aymara, an admiral in gold braid, teams of advisers and white-coated bodyguards, Mayan priests and ambassadors.
When the mop-haired, chubby-faced poster boy of Latin American socialist politics speaks, they stand around him, filling the stage with the physical embodiment of what is now called the “plurinational” state of Bolivia.
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A new leaked memo from the EPA has the beekeeping world buzzing. Bad puns aside, the failure of the EPA to protect the environment — in this case, bees — jeopardizes beekeepers’ ability to continue in their work. Beekeeper Tom Theobald, who exposed the leaked memo, says that beekeepers now lose 30 to 40 percent or more of their hives each year, and it takes two years to recover each one. Theobald has been a beekeeper in Boulder County, Colorado for 35 years, but now he says he’s not sure he can continue. “I can’t afford to subsidize this as a hobby. I’ll fold the tent,” he says. “Commercial beekeepers will work themselves to death,” he continues, noting that it’s only the passion and commitment of beekeepers that has staved off a complete collapse of the entire beekeeping industry this long.
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The alternative whistleblower site created by WikiLeaks defectors may launch sooner than later, according to Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN). The project is being referred to as “OpenLeaks” and is reportedly on track to launch this coming Monday. Though the newspaper didn’t name its sources, it’s clear from the group’s goals that the founders essentially want to be the anti-WikiLeaks.
“Our long-term goal is to build a strong, transparent platform to support whistleblowers—both in terms of technology and politics—while at the same time encouraging others to start similar projects,” an anonymous person told DN. “As a short-term goal, this is about completing the technical infrastructure and ensuring that the organization continues to be democratically governed by all its members, rather than limited to one group or individual.”
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John Young, whose name was listed as the public face of WikiLeaks in the site’s original domain registration, also alleged that the website is a lucrative business.
Young said he left the site in 2007 due to concerns over its finances and that WikiLeaks was engaged in the selling of documents.
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Former WikiLeaks staffer Daniel Domscheit-Berg has always considered Julian Assange’s whistle-blowing site a two-pipe operation: One pipe takes submissions in from anonymous leakers, another publishes them out to an uncensorable web site.
But since defecting from WikiLeaks in September and watching the global controversy build around the secret-spilling organization, he’s taking a different approach with his own leak-focused project: Keep the anonymous submissions channel. Ditch the controversial and resource-draining publishing piece altogether.
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Finance
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The Fed data supports our long-held contention that the Congressionally-approved and much despised $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was only a small fraction of the total bailout. By our count, and as we illustrate below below, TARP funds were a mere seven percent of total funds disbursed by federal government to aid the financial sector since 2007. Why does this matter? Because the more we focus on the much-despised TARP, the less we see the invisible hand of the Fed doing the heavy lifting.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Health Canada’s abrupt decision in September to back down from expanding warning labels on cigarette packages came after tobacco company lobbyists waged a co-ordinated, sometimes secretive lobbying campaign, CBC News has learned.
An analysis by CBC News of lobby registry filings and other documents reveals tobacco executives and their paid lobbyists communicated dozens of times with key government ministries and their policy advisers, including the Prime Minister’s Office.
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Civil Society and industry stakeholder groups are up in arms against a decision by the bureau of the United Nations Committee on Science and Technology for Development to task only governments with the decision on improvements for the Internet Governance Forum. Having a multistakeholder nature was said to be the biggest achievement of the non-decision making IGF – and a model for other UN and political processes – because it allowed governments, industry representatives, non-commercial organisations and the academic and technical community to share knowledge and jointly look for best practices in the field of Internet governance. Civil society representatives, according to Wolfgang Kleinwaechter from the University of Aarhus (Denmark), are very concerned that a government-only approach might do away with the multistakeholder model.
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Even if Wikileaks does end up getting closed down for good it has a legacy. We could be about to see the dawning of a new age of Wikileaks-inspired sites, each with their own take on the idea.
As we’ve already reported, OpenLeaks is a site hoping to open as soon as Monday, now it looks like European politics could be getting its own specific whistleblowing destination.
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The operators of a notorious pornography web site granted federal agents administrative access to the site, giving investigators the ability to monitor traffic and public and private chats in an effort to identify users trading “a significant amount of child pornography,” records show.
Beginning in October 2008, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents secretly monitored activity on Free6.com from inside the porn site, which launched in 1998. That covert operation ended earlier this year when Los Angeles-based ICE agents discovered that the web site “had been removed from the Internet by the company responsible for hosting the website.”
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Anyone who still clings to the notion that Fox News is actually a news organization rather than a propaganda machine for special interests — and that it actually is led by journalists who adhere to the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists — must read the leaked memos Media Matters disclosed this morning.
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Joseph Pettey is the owner of Pettey Oilfield Services Inc., and the 2003 Virginia Oil and Gas Festival Man of the Year. Thomas E. Stewart is a third-generation driller who lobbies the government on behalf of energy companies. Both sit on the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, which is increasingly positioning itself as an authority on drilling-related issues like hydraulic fracturing.
The 38-state commission was created in 1935 to promote the efficient harvesting of oil and gas. Its mission was later expanded to acknowledge the need to protect health, safety and the environment while accomplishing that goal. It is funded by government grants and fees from the states. The commission members are appointed by the member governors. Most are state regulators who oversee gas and oil drilling, but at least seven states have representatives who are either lobbyists or energy executives.
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In light of the new memos out about Fox News helping to orchestrate the Republican’s deceptive PR campaign on the health care bill that that Wendell Potter wrote about this week, the Center for Media and Democracy is reprinting and updating an excerpt from one of my personal encounters with Fox News’ efforts to stage-manage political theatre. The piece below also includes material from documented sources compiled in SourceWatch.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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WWF is currently only savable and readable on Mac, but a Windows version should be coming soon.
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More than 80 organizations and businesses are today urging Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski to enact real Net Neutrality rules, not the empty compromise the chairman has proposed.
The letter highlights five key areas in the rules that should be improved to protect the free and open Internet. The Commission is slated to vote on Net Neutrality on Dec. 21.
The signers include Reporters without Borders, Daily Kos, Common Cause, Entertainment Consumers Association, Nonprofit Technology Network, ColorofChange.org, Center for Media Justice, National Hispanic Media Coalition, New America Foundation, Media Access Project and Public Knowledge.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Music/Copyrights
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But when I started serious recording, I used Rosegarden and Audacity, both of which are licensed under the GNU General Public License, and which were, and are free downloads. After my experience with Cakewalk, I wasn’t willing to spend money on something that might or might not work (for excellent lists of DAW and MIDI software see Wikipedia here and here also).
And then some friends introduced me to Garage Band… I quickly bought a Mac. Sure, I could have tried to contribute to the Rosegarden or Audacity, but it’s a time thing. I had to make a decision as to what would get me to where I wanted to be, and going Mac was the best choice. And switching from Linux to Mac OS X on the desktop was easy. My servers still run Linux of course – I don’t trust Windows.
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Maybe even willfully, so not unlike like the false marking troll suits, isn’t USCG kind of right? A little shady and totally groan-inspiring? Perhaps. But unlawful? I’m not so sure. I suppose they shouldn’t be sending out settlement letters threatening statutory damages if statutory damages aren’t on the table, but meh, I’m not sure how far one could stretch that argument in this case. At any rate, the blogosphere is on fire with this one, leading me to believe that popular opinion is USCG had it coming.
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Righthaven is attempting to make a business out of suing Internet websites for copyright infringement. It has filed 180 copyright actions so far —without ever first asking that a work be removed from the target website—in each case alleging “willful infringement” and attempting to extract settlements by threats of statutory damages (up to $150,000), attorneys’ fees and seizure of the domain name.
Democratic Underground — represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Fenwick & West LLP, and attorney Chad Bowers — was sued by Righthaven on August 10 for a five-sentence excerpt of a Las Vegas Review-Journal news story that a user posted on the forum, with a link back to the Review-Journal website.
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Eircom, Ireland’s largest ISP, has provided a clarification of its voluntary “three-strikes” regime to coincide with the launch of its new online music service called MusicHub which it says will offer downloads “up to 75% cheaper than iTunes.”
Eircom, Ireland’s largest ISP, has announced the launch of its new online music service MusicHub while reconfirming its commitment to disconnecting illegal file-sharing as part of its voluntary partnership with the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA).
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One of the litigation scare tactics employed by copyright troll Righthaven is it routinely demands allegedly infringing sites to forfeit their domain names.
But in private, civil copyright litigation, there is no legal basis for such a demand, even if an allegedly infringing website is ultimately found liable for breaching copyright law. The Electronic Frontier Foundation maintains the tactic is a method to coerce settlements from rank-and-file websites that cannot afford to defend themselves from the newspaper-lawsuit factory that is Righthaven.
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Mininova, once the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, has paid a settlement fee to Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN to end the legal clash between the two parties. In return, BREIN dropped the damages claim they were preparing and Mininova has withdrawn their appeal, making it impossible for the site to return to full swing.
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The BitTorrent Inc. team has just added two of the most interesting apps yet to the popular uTorrent client. The first one allows users to integrate the all-round media player VLC to uTorrent, making it possible for users to play media files from within the client. The second is uCast, an exciting new app which enables users to share a ‘live’ RSS feed of selected torrents with friends.
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The Public Relations Consultants Association is appealing the ruling made in November by a High Court judge, who said PRs should pay newspapers a copying license for receiving targeted intelligence via monitors like Meltwater.
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A UK Court has recently issued a decision which may have an impact on the online news market. According to the Court, providers of paid news monitoring and aggregation services which send their customers links to news published by others commit an act of copyright infringement if they do not obtain the consent from the relevant publishers. In the Court reasoning, there appears to be no distinction between content reproduced and merely linked and as a result linking has been held equivalent to reproducing.
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Apparently, they just started looking at this data only 18 months ago. Frankly, the fact that they weren’t looking at that data seven or eight years ago suggests a dysfunctional management team. What’s really silly, of course, is that plenty of folks have made this exact point to people at Warner Bros. and elsewhere for years, and were told that we were just “defending pirates.”
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ACTA
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Canada
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Bill C-32, the Canadian copyright bill currently before Parliament, is a fairly balanced piece of legislation. It gives we consumers the right to format shift media for our own consumption, instead of re-buying that media. And it gives the entertainment industry broad rights to prosecute content thieves — those who never bought the content in the first place.
The big flaw in Bill C-32 is in the section on digital locks. A content owner can lock a piece of digital media, and this bill would make it illegal to unlock it, even to make a backup copy. With a simply digital lock, the content owner can take away all the rights that a consumer has under the law. It’s a return to the early days of the United States Digital Millenium Copyright Act just as the US is relaxing key provisions of that legislation as they relate to locks. It’s a step in the wrong direction, and out of step with evolving industry practice today.
A lot of folks are urging the government to pass C-32. The argument is that we, as a nation, can’t afford to wait any longer for copyright reform. Apparently we’re becoming digital pariah’s because folks like Hulu won’t provide their service in Canada.
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According to documents I recently obtained under the Access to Information Act, this quote was part of a draft speech for Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore. The quote was removed by department officials before approval of the final version.
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As discussion over Bill C-32, the federal government’s controversial copyright bill, heats up in Ottawa, educators, publishers, and authors remain concerned over what consequences await them if the proposed bill becomes law.
One aspect of the legislation that has sparked a fierce debate between the publishing world and the education community is the addition of “education” as a category under the bill’s fair dealing provision. Fair dealing gives permission to use copyrighted materials without the permission of or payment to the copyright holder for specific purposes covered by the Copyright Act. Currently, only materials used for research, private study, criticism, review and news reporting are covered under fair dealing.
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In order to protect students from a more than ten-fold increase in copyright fees, Athabasca University, like the majority of universities in Canada, has decided not to renew its licence with Access Copyright, a Canadian copyright licencing agency. The current agreement will expire on December 31, 2010.
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Medicine Hat College’s existing photocopying licence with Access Copyright officially expired on August 31, 2010; however, the college did sign an extension of that licence to December 31, 2010. The college will not be renewing the licence beyond December 31, 2010 based on advice from the Association of Canadian Community Colleges (ACCC) and on changes to the licence structure initiated by Access Copyright.
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Student Protesters Attack Treasury, Supreme Court In London [Ed: selling the impression students are dangerous anarchists]
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.10.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Adam ordered an older netbook from geeks.com. When it arrived, the wireless Internet didn’t work, so he upgraded the version of Ubuntu Linux from 8.04 to 10.04. This just broke almost everything else on the computer. He returned the netbook to geeks.com, but didn’t expect them to offer a full refund of the purchase price and shipping — which goes against the stated return policy.
A few weeks ago I bought a netbook laptop as a special from geeks.com. It was $199.95 plus $9.95 shipping — total of $209.50. It was an off brand and an older model, but would suit my needs…if it worked. It came installed with Ubuntu linux 8.04, a version that was two years out of date.
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W3Schools.com has released their Browser OS shares for November. GNU/Linux is at 5% starting from 2.6% in November 2003. That is 13.3% CAGR in share over 7 years. In those years the number of PCs has increased 7% per annum (10% CAGR of shipments – 3% deaths) so the number of PCs received/installed of GNU/Linux has increased 20% per annum.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: The KDE team rebrands KOffice into the Calligra Suite. OpenSUSE unveils a rolling release version of its distribution and Google’s Chrome OS has been delayed until next year. This time, we remember our discoveries, and ask whether next year might really be the year of Linux on the desktop. Also, would you like to be part of the team?
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Thin clients have many advantages. One barrier to adoption has been that one needs special knowledge to set up a server to run them. Even with the availability of GNU/Linux installers that create a server, one needs to know stuff about networking or configuration to change or add things to the system.
see
* Skolelinux
* Ubuntu, from the “alternate” CD
* Debian GNU/Linux, using the package manager, APT
* EdUbuntu
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Google
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Google announced more details about its web-centric Chrome OS operating system, including a new 12.1-inch “Cr-48″ reference notebook that will be provided to beta testers. The first commercial Chrome OS notebooks will ship in mid-2011 from Acer and Samsung, and will be available with free cellular connectivity provided by Verizon, the company added.
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To be honest, there’s a lot in the Chrome web store that is underwhelming; many apps are essentially links to popular webapps. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—it does still provide a place for you to search out and find good webapps for what you need, and many of today’s webapps are pretty fantastic thanks to new technologies like HTML5. Once you find them, however, you’re left with something pretty similar to a custom start page from the likes of myfav.es—or just Chrome’s new tab page, but more customized. If you’re looking for the Chrome web store to provide something that isn’t already in your bookmarks bar, these five apps are sure to impress.
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Also built into Chrome 8 is support for the forthcoming Chome Web Apps store. The store, which is still to be launched, will allow users to download paid-for and free applications for the Chrome browser.
Synchronisation has been improved as well and all settings can be accessed from the Google Dashboard, with links to the Google Dashboard provided in the Chrome browser’s Options dialogue box.
Performance wise, Google says that Chrome 8 should perform two to three times faster on most platforms than the version 7 release.
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Optimisation only makes sense if the code in question is used a lot – this seems to be the philosophy followed by the compilers of the latest incarnation of Google’s free V8 JavaScript Engine. The new “Crankshaft” compilation infrastructure for V8 uses runtime information to see which parts of the code would benefit the most from optimisation. The developers say that the technique is mainly useful in large JavaScript programs; short scripts, such as those used by the SunSpider benchmark, do not benefit much.
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I signed up to be a beta tester of the new Google Chrome notebook
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The Chrome OS Notebook appears to be a rather basic system that’s almost the perfect definition of a netbook. Like the early netbooks, the Cr-48 runs a non-Windows operating system and its primary purpose is to run a browser.
While Chrome OS aims to make things quite a bit more user-friendly compared to the early day 7-inch netbooks, there is always going to be the case where a user will ask where the start button is to find solitaire.
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Google Mobile Platform vice president Andy Rubin literally arrived with a bag full of tricks at the D: Get Into Mobile Conference, showing publicly for the very first time an Android “Honeycomb” tablet.
The roughly 10-inch Motorola device was sleek, black, thin, and sported an Android interface unlike any we’ve seen before. There was a very clean homepage, but the app page looked almost Apple iPad-like. Plus, when Rubin brought up the Gmail app, it looked almost exactly like Gmail on the iPad.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Longtime underdog Opera Software has released its browser Opera 11. Opera’s browser has developed a small cult-like following since its inception in 1996, its following based primarily on its speed, innovation and open-source ideals. In a series of browser firsts, Opera was the first browser to introduce tabbed browsing which has now become the industry standard.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Let’s say you want to surf the Web and find some content. The first utility to look at is also one of the oldest, the venerable Lynx. Lynx actually was my first Web browser, running on a machine that couldn’t handle X11. In its most basic form, you simply run it on the command line and give it a filename or a URL. So, if you wanted to hit Google, you would run:
lynx http://www.google.com
Lynx then asks you whether you want to accept a cookie Google is trying to set. Once you either accept or reject the cookie, Lynx loads the Web page and renders it. As you will no doubt notice, there are no images. But, all the links and the text box for entering search queries are there. You can navigate from link to link with the arrow keys. Because the layout is very simple and text-based, items are in very different locations on the screen from what you would see when using a graphical browser.
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Wine
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Twelve million addicts, err, players cant be wrong. Theres no doubting the draw of World of Warcraft. And today, as Blizzard rolls out its third, much-anticipated expansion to the game Cataclysm, CodeWeavers ensures that Linux gamers can play right along with their PC and Mac brethren. CodeWeavers Linux customers will be able to run Cataclysm as if they were running on Windows with today’s immediate shipment of CrossOver Games 9.2.1.
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Games
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Wolfire, developers of the upcoming rabbit fighting game Overgrowth (sequel to the open-sourced Lugaru), have posted a teaser site indicating a second Humble Indie Bundle is in the works. The original bundle promoted several indie Linux games with a “pay what you want” offer; moreover, the source code for several of the games was released in the process.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Just in time for the holiday gift rush, the Promo team has set up stores where you can find a variety of shirts, hats, and accessories sporting cool KDE designs. Special thanks to Eugene Trounev, Bugsbane and Sebastian Kügler for some of the first designs.
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GNOME Desktop
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It is one thing to have engineers answer questions when they have the knowledge to do so. It is another thing to have them submit their plans and patches to a community forum and have them exposed under the harsh light of peer review.
On more than one occasion, I have heard a hiring manager say that he didn’t have time to have a developer go through peer review of specs or patches – after all, he was hired because he was competent to do the job, and what are we paying him for if he’s going to be second-guessed by “the community”? After a first job or internship, peer review is more an exception than the rule for professional software developers (regrettably, I might add).
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The holidays are upon us and many are running around trying to get loved ones shiny boxes to open Christmas morning. Oftentimes, Linux users get a cute plush penguin or a cool book. But sometimes surprises come from the most unexpected places.
This is what will happen this year, only now it’s no longer a surprise. Despite being guilty of letting the cat out of the bag, Sabayon is planning a Christmastime Gaming Edition release. Fabio Erculiani, Sabayon founder and lead developer, said, “We can show the world that Linux is a valuable, performant Gaming platform.” This is sure to include a long menu of popular games native for Linux and demonstration versions for several commercial offerings.
[...]
So, be sure to hit the hay early Christmas Eve so Santa can leave your shiny new Gaming Edition under your keyboard.
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Readers are asked to decide who deserves to win the 2011 Linux New Media Award for Favorite Linux Distribution.
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Reviews
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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As with previous version, Mandriva is holding a contest to bulk up its wallpaper choices in the upcoming release, Mandriva 2010.2. This is the second update to 2010 Spring due out around Christmas. This time though, you get to vote for which you like best. But hurry, contest ends December 16.
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Red Hat Family
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Equities research analysts at UBS AG (NYSE: UBS) boosted their price target on shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) from $44.00 to $50.00 in a research note to clients and investors on Wednesday. The analysts currently have a “buy” rating on the stock.
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Linux software developer Red Hat Inc.’s stock could rise 20 percent over the next year on better-than-expected revenue, an RBC Capital Markets analyst predicted Wednesday.
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Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, has announced the next generation Business Rules Management System, JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5.1, as part of its open source middleware portfolio, JBoss Enterprise Middleware.
In a release, the Company said that JBoss Enterprise BRMS is an open source business rules management system that enables active decisions with easy business rules development, access and change management. This functionality allows businesses to quickly change the rules and active decisions that underpin enterprise applications to respond to market dynamics and competitive positioning.
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The 52-week range of the stock is $26.51-$49. An analyst at RBC Capital upgraded shares of Red Hat from Sector Perform to Outperform this morning. The firm also boosted its pricetarget by nearly 43% from $40 to $57.
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Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, announced that it joined in a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking correction of the standard for inducing patent infringement.
According to a release, the “friend of the court,” or amicus brief, submitted by Red Hat and others seeks reversal of a lower court decision that threatens to expand patent litigation. The brief argues that the law requires that only those who actually know of the specific patent at issue and know that it covers the alleged infringing activity can be found liable.
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Debian Family
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It certainly is faster compared to Mepis 8.5 on my old desktop box, which by the way does not allow pretty effects regardless of the distro I use.
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The desktop-base package just updated on my Debian Squeeze desktop, and it brought with it the new wallpaper for the distribution’s soon-to-be-stable release. What do you think? (Click the image for the full 1366×768 view).
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I wrote yesterday about the “whimsical spaceship” (that’s a good name, don’t you think?) theme coming to the Debian Squeeze desktop and Grub screen and wondering why the login screen still was so Lennyish.
Today a new gdm3 package rolled into Squeeze, and once it installed (I’ve been using Aptitude on the command line to do the updates) I logged out and saw yet more spaceship whimsy.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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To be sure, every release of Ubuntu — just like every other operating system out there, open-source or proprietary — has its bugs, some of them quite serious. Ubuntu 10.10 is not a standout in this respect.
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The Ubuntu Certification Programme has been around for a while. I think now is a good time to start sharing more on this activity with the community and invite participation. We have created a wiki with the following content to start the conversation.
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Ubuntu One Music has now support for iPhone’s new AirPlay technology, which allows users to stream audio, video and image files stored in your Ubuntu One account directly to your Applet TV, stereo device, or any other AirPlay-compatible hardware. The AirPlay technology was made available by Apple via the new iOS 4.2 software update.
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Flavours and Variants
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Recently I said that Ubuntu 10.10 is really not a compelling upgrade. Linux Mint 10, though it’s based off of 10.10, is (in my opinion) worth the trouble. Like 10.10, Linux Mint 10 is not a revolutionary update, but the changes here are not focused on the Canonical services.
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That’s how many one FAB, TSMC, might produce in 2011. TSMC expects to produce about 1.8 million wafers for Qualcomm in 2011 and each wafer can hold about 1000 ARM CPUs. These CPUs will go into iPads, smart-phones, smart-thingies, and a variety of personal computers, few of which will run that other OS, certainly not “7″.
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Phones
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Android
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Thankfully, Google has started the release process for their latest and greatest Android version — Gingerbread. I’m looking forward to installing CyanogenMod’s spin of 2.3 as soon as it’s available. The big frustration for me, however, is that Gingerbread turned out not to be the tablet killing OS we all hoped for. Oh sure, there are some Android tablets available, but until Google allows regular access to the Marketplace, tablets running Android are going to be a kludge.
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There’s no doubt that Androids are swarming, but 300,000 activations a day, as Google VP of Engineering Andy Rubin tweeted? “Seems like a stretch,” said Frost & Sullivan analyst Michael Jude, who added the figure “may represent the number of phones being shipped from manufacturers, many of which end up in warehouses rather than in people’s pockets.”
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Sub-notebooks
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The Jolicloud team have today announced their intention to release Jolicloud 1.1 for download later today with updates rolling out to current Jolicloud users during this week. Click through for more details…
The message from today’s announcement is clear – with Jolicloud 1.1 the French developer is offering its users an experience one step ahead of what Google, Apple and Microsoft are announcing. “While everybody talks about HTML5 as the future, we deliver it today, now and for everyone,” explains the blog post. “But here is the trick, you should not be forced to buy an expensive device to benefit of these technologies. With Jolicloud, you just need to recycle any computer.”
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Mr. Marino contended Mr. Aleynikov simply made a mistake in trying to download open-source code from Goldman, but didn’t steal proprietary information from the investment bank. He said Mr. Aleynikov made no efforts to sell the information he took and didn’t share it with Teza.
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On a regular basis, we at OStatic round up our ongoing collections of open source resources, tutorials, reviews and project tours. These educational toolkits are a big part of the learning mission we try to preserve at the site. We regularly collect the best Firefox extensions, free online books on open source topics, free tools for developers, resources for working with and enjoying online video and audio, Linux tutorials, and much more. In this post, you’ll find an updated set of more than 45 collections and resources. Hopefully, you’ll find something to learn from here, and the good news is that everything found in this post is free.
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LibreOffice RC1 is released, this new beta release comes to fix some known issues, now the Linux and MacOSX builds are English builds with the possiblity to install language packs. Find bellow the release notes in details, also the installation instructions for Fedora, Debian, LinuxMint and Ubuntu.
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opentaps In The Cloud with Amazon EC2
Want to get up and running quickly and easily on enterprise-class open source ERP and CRM?
Want to run it on demand on world class infrastructure and pay by the hour?
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Due to a vulnerability in the design of the WebSocket protocol, the Mozilla Foundation has decided to disable support for this protocol in the forthcoming Firefox 4 Beta 8 release. The vulnerability in the code for transparent proxies can potentially be exploited to poison the proxy cache and inject manipulated pages.
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Just like promised Mozilla has delivered an update to the stable branch of the Firefox web browser. The update, which is released on the same day as the Mozilla Thunderbird update, fixes several security and stability issues in the web browser, making it a recommended update for all Firefox 3.6.12 and earlier users. Firefox 3.6.13 is currently in distribution to wordlwide mirror servers to ensure that updating Firefox users will not experience lags or slowdowns during the rush once the update has been announced officially.
The official update notification can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours, it is hard to say at this point.
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Browser-maker Mozilla still has a tricky relationship with Google, judging from statements made last night by its new chief executive, Gary Kovacs.
Reporters had a chance to ask Kovacs a few questions at the Mozilla open house yesterday, when the company invited us into its Mountain View, Calif. headquarters to preview some of the new features in its Firefox browser. The gathering came just a day after Google held its own press event, where it announced some improvements to its Chrome Web browser, as well as a pilot program for Chrome OS, its netbook operating system that’s built around Chrome.
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Databases
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This past Monday updates in both the 5.1 and 5.2 series of MariaDB were released. It’s a pretty big deal, as some issues have been solved that affect a large number of users. You should read the release notes for MariaDB 5.1.53 and for MariaDB 5.2.4 as well as the release announcement. The annoucement contains download links from worldwide mirrors.
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Oracle
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Everyone who follows Java knew that the Apache Software Foundation was going to resign from its nominal Java Community Process leadership position. Apache had given fair-warning that it was not going to rubber-stamp Oracle’s Java plans in November. Then, when Oracle rolled over Apache and Google’s objections to its Java plans in December, the scene was set for Apache to leave and, eventually, force a Java code fork.
There’s a long story behind why Apache, a four-time JCP “Member of the Year” is going with its own Java-related plans. The story actually doesn’t start with Oracle, but with how Sun handled the “open-sourcing” of Java in 2006.
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Oracle is planning to take over the world. Or, at the very least, the server OS world. That’s the logical conclusion to reach after hearing the recent comments of Larry Ellison, Oracle’s bombastic CEO. “Solaris is clearly the No. 1 Unix, and we’re working very hard at making Oracle Enterprise Linux the number one Linux,” InfoWorld reported he said at a company event last week.
[...]
When it comes to security, the upgraded Unix server OS will include secure boot, so applications and data are secure as they start. The OS will also enforce role-based root access and encrypt ZFS datasets to provide extra security to stored data.
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CMS
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The popularity of open source content management systems, and the number of open source CMS options have grown exponentially in the last three years. However, it has become increasingly difficult for users to separate the good from the bad, in a market where–irony of ironies–even proprietary options are trying to look more like open source projects in order to get buyers’ attention.
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Business
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Project Releases
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NetCitadel LLC released version 4.1.3 of Firewall Builder today. Firewall Builder is a leading firewall management solution for Linux iptables and other firewalls.
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Standards/Consortia
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Last week I had a weird experience. I went to the Department of Communications and Social Research of the Faculty of Communication Sciences of La Sapienza, the first and biggest University in Rome. The reason I went there was to attend the presentation of the Italian Manifesto for Open Government, on which I’ll report soon in another article. The promoters of the Manifesto spent the whole morning explaining in detail all its ten articles, including the fourth and fifth that strongly assert the importance of opening public data, that is publishing them without restrictions in open file formats.
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Even though Adobe won’t produce a Flash Player for Linux on PowerPC, it still maintains the player for Mac OS X on PowerPC. Nice for the Mac users, shitty for the Linux users.
Aside from all of that. Why should video — a growing component of information-delivery on the Web — be funneled through Flash?
Luckily HTML5 is there to save us from all of this. Once it’s totally rolled out, video will come into Web pages through standard tagging that enabled web browsers understand, and the video will be presented in codecs that are already part of that browser’s collection of viewable formats.
And if/when the biggest video site around, and that would be YouTube, dumps Flash for HTML5, look the #$$ out.
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To my mind, the biggest variable that will determine whether China will reap the largest benefits from its participation in global ICT standards activities will be whether it decides to only participate in the traditional “Big I” standards organizations, or whether it will also fully engage in participating in, and more importantly founding, standards development and promotional consortia. Least effective of all will be continuing to form inward-looking consortia limited to domestic companies. From this route I can see only institutionalizing antagonism, standards wars, and lost opportunities.
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Security
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Cablegate
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Distancing himself from Republican Party orthodoxy (as he’s prone to doing), Texas Congressman Ron Paul gave a rousing speech on the U.S. House floor in support of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. “Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?” asked Paul. He went on to compare WikiLeaks to the Pentagon Papers, explaining how both exposed American wars that were based on “lies.” He also asked his colleagues which events caused more deaths, “Lying us into war, or the release of the WikiLeaks papers?”
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The nominal trigger for this was the denial of service to WikiLeaks by PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, supposedly for “illegal activities” although the USA has stated that the USA has not charged WikiLeaks with any illegal activity. PayPal was caught in a lie that it claimed PayPal had received a letter advising them of illegal activities by WikiLeaks. In fact, PayPal and other such services are only too glad to serve businesses such as porn and gambling regardless of their legality. Thus many see this action as a smoke-screen.
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The stupidity of locking up a guy who voluntarily turns himself in to a police station and refusing him bail on questionable charges as a flight-risk is beyond belief. His lawyers have been unable to communicate with the Swedish prosecutors for months and yet the court in the UK took the matter seriously. This is clearly a case of judicial harassment and the UK legal system is being jerked around by the Swedish authorities.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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In spite of all this, as of December 3rd, 2010, the official “Save as WWF, Save a Tree” website says that this “green” format…is only usable with some version of Mac OS, will soon be usable with some versions of Windows… but no mention of Linux, which is the most environmentally conscious operating system around.
Operation Payback – Anonymous Message About ACTA Laws, Internet Censorship and Copyright
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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The Brazilian government education authority is set to deploy Intel-powered classmate PCs running Mandriva.
Mandriva is partnering with Positivo to deliver this large-scale, low-cost, open source solution for educational use in Brazil. Including hardware, operating system and other software applications, the per-student cost is estimated to be approximately US $200.
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Google
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An operating system reduced to and optimised for the web browser – that’s the idea behind Google’s Chrome OS. While, at first glance, this doesn’t promise to be of much use, Google has incorporated technologies in Chrome OS which allow users to work without an internet connection and to install certain types of apps that can be used when offline. However, Google isn’t planning to present an alternative to Android, at least for now, touch screen tablets and smartphones are not supported.
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Today was Google Day in the Stokes household, as the same FedEx truck brought both a Nexus S and Google’s newly announced Cr-48 Chrome OS notebook. Below are some unboxing photos and very quick hands-on impressions of the unit.
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Kernel Space
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With the next kernel version, Ext4 will reach new levels of performance and use a trick to increase its storage media formatting speed. Other new features include a discard function that is interesting for slow-trimming SSDs, the “Rados Block Device” for cluster devices, bug fixes and optimisations to Btrfs.
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The Linux Foundation’s Open Compliance Program published its compliance self-assessment checklist on November 1 right on schedule. My blog last month, Self-Assessment Checklist: A Measuring Stick for Open Compliance Efforts | The Linux Foundation, described the organization and goals of the checklist. Over 500 company downloads at Self-Assessment Compliance Checklist | The Linux Foundation later, initial feedback has been gratifyingly positive. I’d like to share with you some observations based on comments received so far.
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Graphics Stack
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Within the open-source world, code examples and documentation can be particularly important in ensuring a lower barrier to participation. One developer, Jose Commins, has worked on creating demos, such as how to use OpenGL within GTK+. One of his projects is GtkGLApp, but now he’s working on a new one involving real-time video streaming to GTK+ 3D surfaces.
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Applications
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It is hard to believe Scribus is almost an adolescent. Just yesterday, Scribus turned ten years old, with the first bits of code written by Franz Schmid in December 2000. A few months later, it was linked on Freshmeat and then, well… it kind of had a life of its own. I googled DTP and Linux and stumbled across the link to Franz’ home pages. Of course it would not compile… (User error on my part.)
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Now it’s a matter of whether they can regain customer confidence seeing as this completely brought down their Digital Rights Management platform for most of this time, among other problems and damaging reputations. I guess we will have to see what their unannounced titles end up being.
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Earlier this year there was the “Humble Indie Bundle” where anyone could purchase a set of four Indie computer games (that are Linux compatible) for any price they wanted. The games included World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru, and Penumbra Overture. This ended up being such a success with the game developers that they ended up open-sourcing the games after raising quite a bit of money off this bundled deal. Now it appears the developers are working on a second Humble Indie Bundle.
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The Venezuelan Presidential Decree 3390, specifically in articles 2 and 7, explains and backs up the reasons why the Venezuelan state should develop a Free Software distribution. Canaima GNU/Linux is this distribution, so it ought to be a Free distribution, without parts that threaten its users’ freedoms.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has offers on the table from multiple cities and developers, including some who are willing to build a new office tower for the Raleigh-based company if it decides to move its corporate headquarters, according to multiple sources.
Raleigh faces keen competition for Red Hat, which sources said is looking for as much as 300,000 square feet of space. Red Hat currently occupies well under 200,000 square feet in two buildings on N.C. State’s Centennial Campus.
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Verdict: Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 6 Desktop and Workstation operating systems are a real option for enterprise deployment. We had no problems setting up the applications bundled in with version 6. The only driver/inhibitor for corporate rollout is how savvy firms’ workforces are with Linux, and the depth of Microsoft infrastructure they already have in place.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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According to a recent email exchange departing COO Matt Assay stated that Canonical has 400 employees right now. In addition to this there are about 50 open positions on Ubuntu Jobs.
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Orta theme finally got a PPA so it’s now easily to install and update.
Before adding the PPA, make sure you have removed any previous instance of the theme!
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Canonical maintains a list of hardware that is certified for Ubuntu. Victor Palau, Platform Services Manager at Canonical wrote a blog post about Ubuntu certification which caused me to wonder if my Dell, XPS M1330 laptop, running Ubuntu 10.10 was Ubuntu certified. Below are the screenshots and steps I took to find the answer that question.
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Currently in the Natty Blueprints there is a blueprint to drop GDM (Gnome Display Manager) for LightDM a new multi-platform Display Manager.
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The Launchpad API was updated yesterday, finally bringing PPA statistics. For now, the stats can only be accessed by using a Python script, but they will probably be implemented on the actual website soon, especially since Mark Shuttleworth is also interested in these stats.
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Phones
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Android
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Cast your mind back to the ancient time that was this August and you’ll recall Eric Schmidt telling you, with no lack of pride, that 200,000 Android phones were being sold each and every day. Skip past Steve Jobs’ snide remarks about what’s included in that tally, and fast-forward to today, where Andy Rubin is blowing minds with the latest, very nicely rounded, total: 300,000 daily activations.
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Last month’s beta launch of Google’s new “Instant” mobile search tool was a sadly US-only affair. But that’s been rectified today, with Google putting its predictive system onto smartphones in another 40 countries and 28 languages. You need Android 2.2 to make it work, though.
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That’s right folks, Andy Rubin has tweeted his second tweet. Our “Early Adopter Platform” has been growing like gangbusters. We all knew that Android was growing but this is pretty phenomenal growth. I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around the numbers. That means that there are 2.1 million activations a week. That’s amazing. As you can see below, over the course of the last 8 quarters Android has shipped a disproportionately large number of units compared to our unfriendly fruit competition.
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Tablets
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With Christmas almost here, manufacturers and developers are doing their best to keep the public interested in their work, even if they’re not announcing products that are going to come out this year. This is why Android Chief Andy Rubin teased fans with a Motorola Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablet set for a release date sometime in 2011. Although exact release dates haven’t been announced yet, some technical specs have been made public and if they are going to be implemented as presented, the tab seems to be out of a new and better generation.
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3D World Magazine features ’10 CG Shorts You Must See’. Big Buck Bunny is on it!
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Events
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I will be attending the FOSS.in event from December 15-17 in Bangalore, India.
As part of the Fedora participation at the FOSS.in, I will be running a GPG keysigning party.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Thunderbird 3.1.7 and Thunderbird 3.0.11 updates are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from www.GetThunderbird.com. These releases fix several problems with large email folders stored on the user’s computer as well as several fixes to improve performance, stability and security.
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Oracle
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The Apache Software Foundation has resigned its seat on the Java SE/EE Executive Committee. Apache has served on the EC for the past 10 years, winning the JCP “Member of the Year” award 4 times, and recently was ratified for another term with support from 95% of the voting community. Further, the project communities of the ASF, home to Apache Tomcat, Ant, Xerces, Geronimo, Velocity and nearly a 100 mainstay java components have implemented countless JSRs and serve on and contribute to many of the JCPs technical expert groups.
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Protesting what it perceives as Oracle’s undue control of Java, the Apache Software Foundation has resigned its seat from the Java SE/EE Executive Committee, the organization announced Wednesday.
“The commercial concerns of a single entity, Oracle, will continue to seriously interfere with and bias the transparent governance of the ecosystem,” an unsigned blog entry from the foundation states.
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced today that it is resigning from the executive committee of the Java Community Process (JCP), the governance body responsible for managing standards related to the Java programming language. The move is a response to Oracle’s ongoing failure to comply with the intellectual property policies established by the JCP.
The heart of the issue is that Apache can’t certify that its open source Java implementation—called Harmony—conforms with the Java language standards because Oracle refuses to supply the necessary test suites under a suitably open license. Oracle’s position on the issue falls afoul of JCP policies, which stipulate that standards and other relevant materials must be freely redistributable and made available under terms that are conducive to enabling third-party open source implementations.
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CMS
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With the Drupal.org redesign launched, I’ve heard many ask, “what’s next?” We always do regular, incremental improvements through the infrastructure and webmasters projects. This will continue, with the new design as a foundation and deployment workflow improved by the redesign project.
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Project Releases
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for the extended announcement and for a complete list of all changes since VirtualBox 4.0 Beta 1.
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Government
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As readers of this blog will know, interoperability is a key issue in Europe at the moment. We are still waiting for the imminent version 2 of the European Interoperability Framework, where we will find out whether true restriction-free open standards will be recommended, on deeply-flawed ones based on FRAND licensing that for practical purposes exclude many free software projects.
[...]
Aside from the fact that open source doesn’t seem to have been given a fair chance in this procurement process, there is also the matter of transparency. As far as I can tell, there are precious few details available about what exactly is in this 189 million Euro mega-contract. At a time when governments across the world are rightly beginning to open up all stages of procurement for public scrutiny, the EU’s old-fashioned “trust us, you little people don’t need to know the details” attitude is not just outdated and misguided, but positively insulting. After all, we are not only paying for all this proprietary software, but also footing the bill for the not inconsiderable salaries enjoyed by members of the European Commission.
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Openness/Sharing
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CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research that is home to the Large Hadron Collider and birthplace of the web, has released its book catalog into the public domain using the CC0 public domain dedication. This is not the first time that CERN has used CC tools to open its resources; earlier this year, CERN released the first results of the Large Hadron Collider experiments under CC licenses. In addition, CERN is a strong supporter of CC, having given corporate support at the “creator” level, and is currently featured as a CC Superhero in the campaign, where you can join them in the fight for openness and innovation!
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Open Data
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The volume of public domestic debt issued in developing countries has grown substantially in recent years, but consistent data on the domestic debt of developing countries have not been generally available until now. As part of the Open Data Initiative, the World Bank is launching an online, quarterly, Public Sector Debt database developed in partnership with the IMF, which will allow researchers and policymakers to explore questions about debt management in a comprehensive manner. The database promotes consistency and comparability across countries by standardizing the treatment of public sector debt, valuation methods, and debt instruments, and by identifying, where possible, the debt of central, state, and local governments as well as extra-budgetary agencies and funds.
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A Queens businesswoman has been to hell and back and it all started when she accused a former boyfriend of rape and, prosecutors say, he framed her for armed robbery.
Seemona Sumasar, 35, spent nearly seven months in jail for a crime she never committed, the Nassau County district attorney now admits.
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As a general rule, I will click on any WikiLeaks cable titled “Underground Party Scene in Jeddah.” And this account of a Halloween party at a prince’s residence in the coastal Saudi city does not disappoint.
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Stone the crows! Or, rather, sacre bleu: the Telegraph has obtained a copy of the Olympic “technical manuals”, the IOC’s guidelines for hosting the Games, which reveal, amongst other stringent requirements, that the main language for 2012 will be the sexy tongue spoken by our Gallic neighbours, with English finishing in second place.
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I used to always give my spare change to the Salvation Army at this time of year — there they were, ringing their bell outside the grocery store, so sure, I’d give a little. That changed when I learned about their anti-gay policies, though…and now there’s another reason to spurn the Salvation Army.
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Food safety officials said 70-year-old Muriel Morris received a four-month jail term, suspended for a year, and was ordered to pay £16,482.70p in costs.
Birmingham City Council, which prosecuted Morris for four breaches of food hygiene law, launched an investigation into the poisoning outbreak after nine officers were taken to hospital during an English Defence League demonstration near New Street station in July 2009.
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AMD, Dell, Intel, Lenovo, Samsung and LG on Wednesday said they plan on focusing on putting digital DisplayPort and HDMI connections into their computer products. They hope to drop analog VGA and LVDS connections in AMD- and Intel-based products by 2015, the chipmakers said. VGA technology is over 20 years old, uses up more power, and supports lower resolutions and less colors than the digital alternatives.
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I don’t know the name of the man responsible for the product description of Remanufactured HP 300 – (CC640EE) Black, but I do know that he’s an anonymous hero. Just a sample from the above:
Do you know what? I really can’t be bothered with writing these description anymore, it’s a printer cartridge! What am I supposed to write really??? It’s a cartridge that prints ink on to paper, you could print some work stuff or a colouring in page for the kids that they’ll half do and then leave laying around on the floor or a poster of the horrible Jonas Bothers for your teen daughter hoping that she might stop listening to there [sic] pathetic attempt of music so much.
And so on.
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The European Union’s human rights agency has criticized the Czech government for using a “sexual arousal” test to determine whether applicants who seek asylum on the basis of sexual orientation are genuinely gay.
According to the BBC, the Fundamental Rights Agency said the Czech Republic was the only E.U. country that continues to use the test, which could violate the European Convention on Human Rights.
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Those who speak to me on Identi.ca and IRC may have noticed more typos than usual from me in the last day or so; this is why. Please take this into account. When I write static pieces like blog posts I always check and fix my typos, “live” chats such as IRC and Identi.ca don’t get the same retouching. It’s taken quite a while to type this post.
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With the latest release of its flagship Core Impact Pro, Core Security Technologies has expanded its application penetration testing software to scan and test network devices as well.
Core Impact Pro version 11, released this week, also includes improved tools for scanning Web applications as well.
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Science
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Janet Napolitano, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that retailing giant Walmart has joined the agency’s “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign.
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Annabel Hayter, the 64 year old chairwoman of Gloucester Cathedral’s Flower Guild, has been forced to resign from her post as a result of her refusal to submit to a criminal record check. As a result of her stance, five other elderly flower arrangers have also resigned in protest.
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The TSA is refusing to apologize to India’s ambassador to the USA, who was flagged for an extended public grope because she was wearing a sari.
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Physicists who led the development of today’s most sophisticated medical imaging technology believe the federal government’s X-rated airport x-ray scanners are useless. Leon Kaufman and Joseph W. Carlson, both former professors of physics at the University of California-San Francisco have been described as the “scientific genius” behind the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines used in hospitals. The pair turned their considerable experience to investigate what the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is using to virtually undress millions of American travelers.
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Thousands of students have gathered ahead of a march on Parliament as MPs prepare to vote on trebling university tuition fees.
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Unable to get water for his two children and frustrated at the lack of information from staff, Mr Wilkie tried to disembark, followed by 30 fellow passengers.
After being persuaded to stay, however, the rebels were stunned when police arrived and arrested their ‘ringleader’ for causing a security alert on a flight.
In court, Mr Wilkie, 36, admitted the charge. But a Scottish sheriff refused to punish him after receiving dozens of letters from passengers supporting him. Instead, the sheriff called on Ryanair to apologise for its ‘ridiculous’ behaviour.
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The Chinese government may have used its access to Microsoft source code to develop attacks that exploited weaknesses in the Windows operating system, according to a US diplomatic memo recently published by Wikileaks.
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Cablegate
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A DNS provider that suffered backlash last week after it was wrongly identified as supplying and then dropping DNS service to WikiLeaks has decided to support the secret-spilling site, offering DNS service to two domains distributing WikiLeaks content.
EasyDNS, a Canadian firm, was attacked last Friday after media outlets mistakenly reported it had terminated its service for WikiLeaks. The company sent an e-mail to customers Thursday morning letting them know that it had begun providing DNS service for WikiLeaks.ch and WikiLeaks.nl, two of the primary domain names WikiLeaks relocated to after WikiLeaks.org stopped resolving.
“We’ve already done the time, we might as well do the crime,” Mark Jeftovic, president and CEO of EasyDNS, told Threat Level about his decision.
DNS service providers translate human-friendly domain names to IP addresses, so when someone types www.Amazon.com into their browser, for example, they’re properly connected to 72.21.211.176, the address of the host.
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WNYC’s Brian Lehrer has spent the last week hosting one WikiLeaks critic after the next on his program, and it seems rather clear that he, too, is a fairly emphatic critic of the group and its founder, Julian Assange.
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Last weekend, rather than read stories about the US diplomatic cables that Wikileaks has released, I decided to read them directly myself. In doing so, I better understood why no one — certainly not the US State Department — is going to shove those cables back into the darkness.
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I am in the process of downloading a file that contains all the unedited cables that Wikileaks has obtained. You can do the same by downloading this link using a program like Vuze. This is a 1.4GB file so it may take a while. As far as I know it is not illegal to download it as it is not copyright material. In any case it is probably not illegal because you cannot read whatever it is that you are downloaded as it is encrypted. What this file is is a Poison Pill. Assange goes, this file is open for humanity to see.
I am downloading this file for two reasons. One is because I believe that if it was so easy for Wikileaks to obtain this information whoever our enemies are probably have it as well. Secondly because while I had mixed feelings on what Julian Assange was doing, I am so disgusted about how Western democracies are reacting towards a person who has not been formally accused of any crime that I think it’s time to stand by Wikileaks to defend freedom of the press.
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The outcry against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is intensifying in the US, drawing a rare degree of consensus from politicians and pundits who have collectively cast him in the role of a common enemy.
In the past few days the calls for action against Assange have grown steadily louder and more shrill, with leading Republicans labelling him a terrorist, and top liberal Democratic politicians, albeit in more moderate language, also calling for his prosecution.
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He said he wouldn’t mind prison. Julian Assange sort of looked forward to it, even. He’d read a nice, long book in peace. And he’d get to sleep in the same bed for the first time in years.
Assange got his wish when he surrendered to British authorities Tuesday. He is charged with allegedly sexually assaulting two women during a lecture stop in Stockholm this August. The first court appearance was predictably messy. He refused to be photographed, finger-printed, or DNA swabbed. And that was before the judge asked Assange for his current address. He gave some post office at first. Then some place in Australia he hadn’t visited in four years.
To be fair, you can’t really ask Julian Assange where he lives. He moved 34 times by the age of 14. A quarter century later, he is even more nomadic. The most connected man in the world lives a rootless existence. He says he resides in airports and has virtually no material possessions, save for his Australian passport and a laptop.
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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the man behind the publication of more than a 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables, could soon be facing spying charges in the U.S. related to the Espionage Act, Assange’s lawyer said today.
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Imperva, the web security specialist, has reported that the tool released by the Anonymous Hacker Group for would-be Wikileaks protesters has been downloaded over 40,000 times, with the majority of downloads occurring in the US.
[...]
Amichai Schulman, chief technology officer at Imperva, said, “The tool was originally developed as an open-source network stress-testing tool. It was recently tweaked to include a central command-and-control module.
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After both Visa and Mastercard stopped allowing donations to the whistle-blowing website, DataCell started helping people to donate directly by bank transfer. “The credit card companies are just not a part of the transactions. There are just as many donations as before, if not more, but they are just transferred direct,” Sigurvinsson told DV. “We have assisted some 2,000 people with that just today.”
[...]
DataCell has indicated that it intends to start legal proceedings against both Mastercard and Visa in Europe and Sigurvinsson says the company has received a lot of offers from lawyers wanting to take the case on for free. He said that the company’s own lawyers have written formal letters to the credit card giants and that other volunteer lawyers will arrive today to discuss strategy.
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About 100 protesters have rallied in Brisbane in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Assange remains in custody in the United Kingdom, facing extradition to Sweden for alleged sexual assault.
Rally organiser Jessica Payne says the Federal Government is trying to stifle the democratic right to freedom of information.
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HUNDREDS of people have taken to Australia’s city streets to pledge their support for detained WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange.
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7.52am: MasterCard, Visa, the Swedish prosecution authority, Joe Lieberman, Sarah Palin, PayPal, Twitter, PostFinance, Amazon and EveryDNS.net. It is an very eclectic mix, but their websites are all under attack, or threat of attack, by supporters of WikiLeaks.
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Paypal has been reported closing Wikileaks’ account through which it obtained donations. This is unacceptable and arbitrary. This is derogatory towards the associations and the thousands of common people who cared enough of their Freedom of Speech to spend money on this. This is why I have decided that if they don’t want Wikileaks’ money, they do not want mine either, and I have closed my account with them.
[...]
Meanwhile, as also Visa and Mastercard have been reported fiddling with Wikileaks’ account without having received any court order compelling them to do so — and this is tantamount to stealing other people’s money if they have blocked incoming payments — I have decided that in protest they will not have the chunk of my not irrelevant Chrsitmas shopping, as I will only use other payments means. If they don’t listent to people’s voice, they will listen the language of money.
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At my company, we use EasyDNS to do our external DNS hosting (building a real, high availability DNS server infrastructure is outside of the scope of our financial resources, so we have them do it for us), and I’ve always been very happy with their service.
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Wikileaks is aware that several government agencies and corporations, including the Swedish prosecutor, Mastercard, PayPal and State.gov have come under cyber-attack in recent days, and have often been driven offline as a result.
The attacks are of a similar nature to those received – and endured – by the Wikileaks website over the past week, since the publication of the first of 250,000 US Embassy Cables.
These denial of service attacks are believed to have originated from an internet gathering known as Anonymous. This group is not affiliated with Wikileaks. There has been no contact between any Wikileaks staffer and anyone at Anonymous. Wikileaks has not received any prior notice of any of Anonymous’ actions.
Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said: “We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets.”
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Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, pressed China to release this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, expressing hope that China will “come to recognize” the positive contribution the pro-democracy activist can make on Chinese society.
In a rare, wide-ranging press conference in Geneva, Pillay presented the U.N.’s strongest public criticism of China’s imprisonment of Liu, who is serving an 11-year jail sentence for drafting the pro-democracy Charter 08 manifesto. Pillay also scolded China for placing Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, under house arrest “that in my view is in contravention of Chinese national law.”
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China today launched its most prolonged and severe crackdown on activists and dissidents in recent years ahead of tomorrow’s Nobel peace prize ceremony honouring the jailed writer Liu Xiaobo.
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What would happen if the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the domain name system oversight body, received an application for a .wikileaks top level domain name (TLD) next year, under its new system of opening up the internet for domains? It could make an interesting example of how well the complex system to apply for new TLDs works and how much political intervention is possible in the system. At the 39th ICANN meeting in Cartagena, Colombia this week, the self-regulatory body is trying to finalise issues in the published Final Applicant Guidebook – and it is governments and trademark owners that are calling for more time and more procedures.
The hot issue discussed by the worldwide internet community, the witch-hunt against Wikileaks by commercial service providers in the US and various countries, is no topic for the private DNS self-governance body, according to ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom. “We have not been approached by governments on this,” Beckstrom said in answer to questions from Intellectual Property Watch at an ICANN press conference.
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So today we pull together some of the brightest minds at the Berkman Center to talk about Wikileaks, with Jonathan Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig moderating.
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EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston joins Declan McCullagh, chief political correspondent for CNET, Niles Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation, and and Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of “The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern” in a discussion on “Wikileaks, Free Speech and National Security.”
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U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay voiced concern on Thursday at reports of pressure being exerted on private companies to halt financial or Internet services for WikiLeaks.
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For those unfamiliar with the depths of Internet sub-culture, “Anonymous” is a hard concept to understand. Simply put they are an anonymous crowdsourced set of vigilantes responsible for puling off some of the most newsworthy stunts in Internet history. But past projects like punking Scientology of flooding YouTube with porn fail in comparison to their recent attempts to disrupt the established entities who they deem to have alligned with the wrong side of justice over the WikiLeaks story. Now, in eerie and awesome fashion, a new video has been posted that describes their agenda in the most historic terms.
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Venezuela’s tottering economy is forcing Hugo Chávez to make deals with foreign corporations to save his socialist revolution from going broke.
The Venezuelan president has courted European, American and Asian companies in behind-the-scenes negotiations that highlight a severe financial crunch in his government.
Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA, is the engine of the economy but buckled when given an ultimatum by its Italian counterpart and has scrambled to attract foreign partners, according to confidential US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks.
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Freedom of speech isn’t a privilege, I posted a little while back.
It’s a right, I said, and that includes having free access to everything which involves us, concerns us and affects us.
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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin criticized the U.S. over the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
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The U.S. Justice Department is examining cyber attacks that have been blamed on WikiLeaks supporters, Attorney General Eric Holder said.
“We are aware of the incidents,” Holder said at a news conference in Washington today. “We are looking into them.”
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, speaking at the news conference with Holder, said the U.S. is coordinating with the “private sector” on cyber issues. Separately, a Department of Homeland Security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the agency is working with companies to limit damages from the attacks.
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I can’t tell you who’s attacked first WikiLeaks and more recently MasterCard, PayPal, and Visa with Distributed Denial of service (DDoS) assaults , but I can tell you it wasn’t hard. It wasn’t even, as such things go, that bad. Just ask Google if you want to know what a real DDoS attack is like.
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Distributed denial of service attacks, of the kind pro-Wikileaks hacktivists have been aiming at PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard, are not particularly complex to pull off.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Here is the good news from Cancún. Brazil, so often demonised for its destruction of the Amazon rainforest, is turning over a new leaf. In the past year it has transformed a sketchy promise made in Copenhagen to cut emissions to 36 to 39 per cent below business-as-usual by 2020 into a detailed science-based plan. And much of the work will be done by the industry most responsible for trashing the Amazon – cattle ranching and commercial agriculture.
World-wide, agriculture is directly responsible for roughly 15 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions – a figure that does not include emissions from the deforestation is causes. Yet the climate talks in Cancún, Mexico, have so far failed to address this industry’s contribution to global warming. Against all odds, Brazil is now bidding to go from the bad boy of forestry and agriculture to their poster child.
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A blue whale’s mouth cavity is so vast and stretchy that it can engulf a volume of water equivalent to its own body mass, say scientists.
The whales – the largest animals on the planet – filter the krill they eat from these huge watery mouthfuls.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Three former Labour ministers face being barred from Parliament after being rebuked for breaching lobbying rules.
The Standards and Privileges Committee ordered ex-defence secretary Geoff Hoon to apologise and said his Commons pass should be suspended for five years.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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EFF recently received documents in response to one of our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that demonstrate a disturbing trend: the FBI’s arbitrary application of FOIA exemptions to hide, or in some instances, reveal, its unlawful activities.
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The 2010 Nobel peace prize was today placed on an empty chair in Oslo’s city hall in a symbolic act to mark its award to Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese writer and pro-democracy activist who is serving a jail sentence in his home country.
In the centrepiece of a simple, moving ceremony watched by an audience of 1,000 people, among them Norway’s king and queen and a clutch of fellow Chinese dissidents, the chairman of the Nobel committee, Thorbjoern Jagland, placed the citation and medal on a simple, blue upholstered seat on a small row of chairs to the right of the hall’s stage.
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First, it was 10 minutes. Then, back in July, it went to 15. Now, according to the YouTube Blog, the site will be selecting some users to have that 15 minute limit raised even higher.
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With the 2010 holidays upon us, it’s time to update EFF’s E-Book Buyer’s Guide to E-Book Privacy, which summarizes and comments on the privacy-related policies of several e-readers.
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Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the principal investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), led an alphabet soup of government agencies in seizing the domain names of 82 Web sites (PDF) that ICE said were “engaged in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and copyrighted works” (See: Operation In Our Sites v. 2.0). The seizures were accomplished by getting the VeriSign registry, owner of the .com and .net top-level domains, to change the authoritative domain-name servers for the seized domains to servers controlled by DHS.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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The next stage of the digital revolution is clearly the combination of mobile internet, cloud computing and billions of sensors to deliver a new generation of “smart” services. These technologies really will be a passport to a better way of living. But Europe will end up playing the second league of these markets if we don’t make good use of open platforms and standards to drive up competition. If we do embrace openness – the systematic use of generic and standardised technologies to create a level but elevated playing field to trigger cutting-edge innovation on top – I think we will be well placed to capitalise on our current leadership in mobiles, telecom, hardware and embedded software. And that means Europeans will take a bigger role in internet innovation.
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EFF has been monitoring the net neutrality debate with an eye to two main concerns, both stemming from our conviction that however laudable the goal of neutrality–and it is a laudable goal–the regulatory and legislative paths that get us there must not amount to a “Trojan horse” that we’ll all regret:
First, we have a well-founded fear of an open-ended grant of authority to the FCC to regulate the Internet, and attendant worries, especially about regulations that could create barriers to entry for the next generation of garage innovators.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Grisbrook had provided photographs for MGN for a number of years, without a written contract, being paid when his photographs were used. MGN archived the photographs it used; any subsequent use by MGN entitled the photographer to a further fee. It was conceded that Grisbrook licensed MGN to use his photos in this way while retaining copyright in them, though there was some dispute as to how far this licence extended. In particular, did it extend to the use of Grisbrook’s works on MGN’s websites?
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Copyrights
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The record industry has dropped its lawsuit against a porn company accused of featuring copyrighted music in its videos. The dismissal may be the result of a confidential settlement, although neither side will comment on the case.
RK Netmedia, which describes itself as the “World’s Best Reality Porn Website,” hires adult actors who perform sexual acts at exclusive nightclubs and parties. As the actors “perform” their lewd acts, popular recordings from artists like Justin Timberlake, Michael Jackson and Katy Perry provide the soundtrack accompaniment. Videos are allegedly named after songs, and actors are encouraged to lip-sync to the lyrics.
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Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the first US citizen to take her file-sharing lawsuit all the way to a verdict, has been hit with three separate damage awards: $222,000, $1.92 million, and recently $1.5 million. The judge has made clear that these figures are absurd; after the second trial, he declared $54,000 the most that he could possibly allow.
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Consumer Focus has entered the debate on the proposed reform of the Patents County Court (PCC). The PCC, soon to be renamed the Intellectual Property County Court, handles most small and medium-sized non-criminal copyright infringement claims.
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Here’s the good news for Ireland’s millions of music lovers. Eircom, one of the country’s biggest ISPs, has launched a new streaming music service free of any additional charges to its subscribers. Eircom’s MusicHub will offer four million music tracks to the company’s customers without any restrictions or advertising (sorry Ars readers, unless you currently reside in the Republic of Ireland, you probably won’t be able to connect to that link).
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Occasional Techdirt contributor Nina Paley, who has pointed out some problems with Creative Commons in the past, is pushing an interesting solution: the Copyheart. It’s not a huge license or anything like Creative Commons, but just a basic suggestion: where you might normally put a © symbol, instead put a ♥ — and perhaps an explanation.
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He identified a four-pronged strategy of consumer awareness, fine-tuning business models, technology and legislation to fight online piracy. However, a campaign to raise consumer awareness on online piracy might take decades, which he likened to anti-smoking or drunk driving.
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Digital Garage, long time friend and supporter of CC, has just donated $100,000 to our annual campaign! According to Joi Ito, Digital Garage Co-Founder and Board Member and CC CEO – “Digital Garage considers Creative Commons to be a key piece of infrastructure for our global society. As a cutting-edge business that invests in internet companies and incubators that help facilitate this global society, it’s imperative that Creative Commons remains as strong as possible.”
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Last time on the CC blog I was sharing my thoughts about the evaluation of CC’s contribution to Collaboration and Sharing. There was a part there in which I was making the point that it is an impact which is distinctly challenging for estimation. Well, my full hearted belief that that analysis is, in fact, the pinnacle of prospective hardships can explain why when I first came to engage with CC’s contribution to the field of art, I was feeling lighthearted. After all, most of the characteristics which made sharing and collaboration such a tough domain to gauge, are not properties of art. So, I can begin by reporting that it was definitely light-minded to be lighthearted; the contribution to art is a completely independent pandora’s box.
Videos in The Board
Credit: TinyOgg
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Send this to a friend
12.09.10
Posted in News Roundup at 7:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The number of PCs deployed is likely to be as much as 1.5 million, making it one of the biggest deployments of GNU/Linux.
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I have to admit. I do like the command line and one of my favourite programs is Tilda. A drop down shell which allows me to run commands quicker than any mouse happy click lover. More often than not I run a quick command to do file operations, system operations and remote connections. It’s not pretty, all text and no fancy eye candy but it gets the job done, fast.
However, many proponents of proprietary operating systems ridicule us Linux lovers for our command line commando ways and maintain that it is not possible to use Linux without having to write a command line or two. I have always said pshaw to that and two seconds later found myself immersed in a bash shell. I put it down to my habits and choice of Linux (Gentoo) as well as knowing too much for my own good
[...]
So I have at least proven to myself, eaten my own dog food that Linux can be used in exactly the same way most people use other operating systems without having to fire up a command line. This was done not on a normal run of the mill pc either. This was done on exotic hardware which if there was going to be a problem, there would have been a problem.
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We have an opportunity to introduce a mainstream TV audience to the great stuff that Linux can do in schools, but we need 25 Linux enthusiasts to commit to show up in order to accomplish it.
I just spoke with a program manager for a TV show called ABC 7 Live. They are interested in having supporters of Linux in schools (and particularly Partimus.org) attend a show. The show airs daily from 3 pm to 4 pm. I need a list of 25 people who will attend. I need the list by Thursday, 12/9/10 at 3 pm. You must be on the list to be admitted to the studio. I am coordinating the list, so please be sure to email me to get on the list. You can email me at einfeldt a t gmail dot com. You can watch shows from the archive here
http://7liveonline.com
They have had famous people like Mark Zuckerberg on this show.
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Of course that “free” system is Linux. Usually some local system builder will be glad to build systems and preload Linux for a church. That same local system builder can likely provide support if asked. Any Linux distribution could serve as a good base on which a church could build its IT operations. On the desktop I would still recommend Mandriva despite its roller coaster history. Mandriva is a very easy to learn, user-friendly Linux distribution. It has easy GUI tools in the Mandriva Control Center to help the Linux novice get started with setup of a Linux system. At this point I would recommend the Gnome desktop for end-users coming from Microsoft that need a full-blown GUI to be comfortable. Once KDE 4.x is back to being at least as good as KDE 3.5.10 I may recommend that again. But I do not recommend KDE at this point.
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Server
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The Top500 is the favorite punching bag of many people in HPC. My beef is not with the Top500, it is with all those who make it out to be something it is not. In my opinion, it is good historical record of those machines that can run a single benchmark. There is of course certain bragging rights for landing on the Top500 and it may help people justify an expensive pile of hardware. I suppose getting your system listed on a web page is good thing™, but there are those who have real work to get done and can brag about minor things like application throughput, optimization, and utilization.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Google
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The long-awaited Chrome OS is finally here, and the first Chrome notebooks are winging their way to happy beta testers as you read this.
So is it the operating system reinvented, or just a nifty way to squeeze more speed out of laptops?
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation publishes an annual Linux report that shows (approximately) who has written and contributed to the Linux kernel. The report is put together by LWN’s Jon Corbet (also a kernel contributor) and kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, with additional contributions from the Linux Foundation’s Amanda McPherson.
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Applications
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In this article, I’ve come across 30 of the most popular Scientific and Engineering free and open source packages that students, scientists and programmers in the engineering field can greatly appreciate. These packages aren’t categorized in any particular way, it’s just a top 30 list of packages that has been most popular lately.
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Mind mapping applications are a way to sort and outline the various pieces and steps of any particular process or problem. Related ideas are connected, creating a visual web of interrelated concepts. Mind mapping forces both the logical and the creative sides of your brain to work together. Free software can help you through the task with apps like VYM, Labyrinth Maps and Semantik.
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BitTorrent is a fast, reliable and fairly straightforward way to download files large and small. We’ve got a guide right here. Whether you’re regularly downloading meaty Linux distributions or simply prefer to try-before-you-buy, you’ll be needing a decent torrent client to keep your downloads in check.
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With so many security tools available, it can be hard to know what to use. Many users do not want to be bothered with downloading, learning and configuring security software when so many other things need to be done. The good news is tools that system administrators would manually install, and checks that they would write scripts to do as part of a security audit, are available out of the box in Linux distributions.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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A few weeks ago LGN reported that Happypenguin aka The Linux Game Tome is back (although it wasn’t possible to submit news).
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Features:
* awesome 2D-graphics with an unique style
* a stunning amount of particles
* single- and multiplayer-support
* an artificial intelligence using an aggro-system, which reacts differently upon varying situations
* many impressive weapons
* several game modes
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Gaming on Linux is alive and kicking. There is a good base of free and commercial games to play with a steady stream being released and enhanced each month, encompassing a wide range of game categories. The purpose of this article is to identify some more remarkable free Linux games which are definitely worth investigating. The article is not restricted to any particular genre, so hopefully there will be something of interest here for any type of gamer.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KDE is a growing community with growing needs. The KDE Sysadmin team works hard to keep up, but lately the servers have been coming under some strain.
To help ease the situation, Canonical has donated a new server for the KDE Sysadmins to use. The server, named kundong, features an impressive 8 CPU cores, 6 GB of memory, and a 130 GB disk with space for several more disks as needed. It is hosted in Canonical’s data center in central London.
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Part of the big hype over the release of KDE 4 was its new and improved eye candy, mostly due to the Plasma workspace. Those who liked the changes, loved the new KDE from the beginning. Those who did not are still complaining about it. But like any good desktop environment, you are by no means stuck with the default look. In fact, KDE offers more easily customizable features than any other. What follows are 7 ways to get the desktop look you dreamed about when you were a child.
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Many of the changes in the beta are of interest mainly to developers and not directly observable to casual users, although the changes may affect development in future releases.
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GNOME Desktop
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Though we used to talk a lot about Ubuntu desktop eyecandy, Conky is something we never really discussed at all. Conky Ubuntu Lucid theme was the only exception, which is by far the most easy to install Conky theme I have ever used. So as to settle the Conky drought once and for all, here we feature one of the best collection of Conky configurations available.
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Take a peek at some crazy new video effects coming to the Cheese webcam tool in this video by GNOME developers Daniel Siegel & Andreas Nilsson.
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Xfce
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KDE today announced the immediate availability of a second set of beta releases for the upcoming 4.6 series. These releases, codenamed Caramel, bring previews of new versions of the Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook workspaces as well as introducing major changes to applications and the KDE Platform.
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Yes, there must be something about this time of year that has made tongues more likely to wag and Linux bloggers more likely to think about daily updates. How else to explain the recent rash of rumors and discussions on the topic of release schedules for certain popular Linux distros?
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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After months of careful consideration, lots of contributions, and a set process, the Mageia project has decided upon a logo. Some may find it a bit understated, while other may find it offensive. In any case, the new bubbling cauldron is it.
There were so many beautiful entries in contention for the new face of Mageia, but this simple design prevailed. The winning entry was submitted by Olivier Faurax. He says of the winning logo, “The cauldron with bubbles could imply magic – not really a theme to attract most potential users. Or it could refer to the development process – a sort of inside joke, which wouldn’t be understood by most without explanation.”
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is one of today’s notable stocks on the rise, up 2.6% to $48.15.
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Dell is proud to announce the launch of OEM support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 (RHEL 6) which is certified on 9G, 10G, and 11G Dell servers and is an excellent complement to Dell’s open standards-based strategy. RHEL 6 provides customers with a proven, scalable, manageable and reliable open standards-based operating system that delivers even more compelling reasons for customers to migrate off of proprietary, UNIX-based systems.
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JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5.1 is the latest piece of the Red Hat open-source middleware portfolio, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, and the first new release of the JBoss BRMS since May 2009. The new release brings additional authoring and management tools for use by business analysts and developers, said Pierre Fricke, director of product line management for middleware at Red Hat, in an interview with eWEEK.
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Fedora
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I found Laughlin to be the most stable and solid version of Fedora I’ve tried in years.
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One of the things that bothers me about Fedora development is that things automatically end up anywhere after being built. I’m a big believer in having to do something to put software in the hands of users, even if they are running a development distribution, and even if they should “be able to fix whatever breaks”. Today, if you build something in rawhide, it’ll land on user machines tomorrow (in the default case). This applies especially if you do a “known good” build and then do “just one more” before the early morning hours when the mirrors get updated with today’s version.
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Debian Family
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Two years ago today my family made the switch from Windows to Ubuntu. This wasn’t an overnight decision, and it wasn’t without complications. At the time we only had one desktop in our home (now we have a couple of laptops as well) and I intended to set it up to dual-boot. Unfortunately, what I didn’t know was that the version of BIOS on the desktop didn’t recognize USB connections, so it wouldn’t respond to keystrokes from the USB keyboard. And no, there was no other type of port available. By late that evening a couple of years ago we were set up with Ubuntu 8.10 fully installed on our family desktop. Although I did install Windows in Virtualbox for my son’s games, other than that we’ve been an Ubuntu-only household since then.
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Alpha 4 is available. This is a test release not a production release. It is intended for MEPIS Testers only. The ISO files are: SimplyMEPIS-DVD-TEST_10.9.82_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-DVD-TEST_10.9.82_64.iso
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A new update for Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “Lenny” has been released. Due to an issue with the preparation, the linux-2.6 packages included in this point release do not incorporate the security fixes released in DSA 2110-1. DSA 2126-1, which has just been released, includes the updates from both DSA 2110-1 and the linux-2.6 packages from this point release. All other recent security updates have been added as well as some fixes for critical issues. New CD and DVD images as well as update CDs and DVDs are available.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Today I recorded a short screencast that showcases some of the excellent work going into Unity and that is available in the Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal developer version of Ubuntu.
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A few days ago I decided to upgrade my desktop Ubuntu OS from 10.10(Maverick Meerkat) to 11.04(Natty Narwal) Alpha 1. Previous experience upgrading to such an early alpha release told me that this would be very risky and likely I would have to re-install back to the stable release. But after the lengthy upgrade process was completed(took a few hours because I had Gnome, KDE, and LXDE desktop environments previously installed), I successfully rebooted and was greeted with the familiar GDM login screen.
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The Ubuntu Technical Board is currently conducting a review of the top ten Brainstorm issues users have raised about Ubuntu, and Matt asked me to investigate Idea #25801: Help the user understand when closing a window does not terminate the app. In other words, figure out to signal to the user that an application will continue to run after all of its windows have been closed.
This is more than a good idea, it’s an important gap in the usability of most of the desktop operating systems in widespread use today.
It’s also come up in our user testing: Charline’s research on Unity identified a lack of feedback to users and she observed the same absence of good feedback in the Rythmbox interface, where Rhythmbox can continue running in the background, playing music, with no windows visible.
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All the leading commercial Linux companies are certified to Linux Standard Base 4.0 (LSB 4.0), including Canonical, Kylin, Linpus, Mandriva, Neoshine, Novell, Oracle, Red Flag and Red Hat.
The Linux Foundation has also released a beta of the LSB 4.1 and is soliciting feedback from the public. The official release of LSB 4.1 is expected in January. The LSB delivers interoperability between applications and the Linux operating system, allowing application developers to target multiple versions of Linux with just one software package. It also allows Linux vendors to demonstrate to their customers that they meet a common set of industry standards and that they work together as an industry on advancing Linux.
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Yes, this helicopter has a Kinect on board, one that’s connected to a Linux box.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Prepare yourself for an all new Nokia experience in 2011. Nokia’s Director of Design Strategy Marko Ahtisaari said that Nokia is planning to launch devices based on a completely new approach to its UI and will be built on Meego. But, Ahtisaari did not not to give any details about the devices which are awaiting us. Ahtisaari revealed this at the LeWeb conference in Paris.
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Android
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A report by Arieso comparing data usage by Android and iPhone users highlights few interesting points. The study shows that Android user are more active online than the iPhone 4 users.
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The technology that drives the ‘wheel’ Mehta, an ex-employee of Siemens AG, is a vociferous supporter of open source platforms. He developed the tool, christened ‘Arpit’s Wheel’, using simple computing hardware and FOSS (free and open-source software) tools and frameworks, which later bagged him the Manthan Award in 2008 in the e-inclusion category.
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Oracle
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Developer Snapshot OOo-Dev DEV300m95 is available for download.
DEV300 is the development codeline for upcoming OOo 3.x releases.
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Oracle will port its Enterprise Linux distribution to Sun’s Sparc processor, a move that could help it compete better against IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the high-end server business.
CEO Larry Ellison made the disclosure in response to a question about Oracle’s Linux strategy at the company’s Sparc systems launch last Thursday.
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Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, has fired back at Larry Ellison and his beloved Exadata for cloud computing, saying that the server fails the cloud test and that Oracle lacks a genuine vision.
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BSD
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Kris Moore has announced two snapshots of PC-BSD work-in-progress: version 8.2 and 9.0. Any feedback (positive and/or constructive) is welcome on the Testing Mailinglist.
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Firstly, my thoughts are with my online friend (and co-host of Techbytes) Gordon, who’s under the weather at the moment and hope for a speedy recovery, certainly if he is absent from the show its going to leave a gap which will be noticeable to all the kind people who tell us they enjoy listening. If Gordon is absent I hope you will stick with us until he returns.
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The merchant, Vitaly Borker, 34, who operates a Web site called decormyeyes.com, was charged with one count each of mail fraud, wire fraud, making interstate threats and cyberstalking. The mail fraud and wire fraud charges each carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The stalking and interstate threats charges carry a maximum sentence of five years.
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Pretty much every geek who has ever drawn breath lusts after a “Star Trek”-style replicator. The advent of 3D printing and CNC machines, such as the MakerBot, have started to make that dream a reality. They offer the DIY enthusiast the ability to create pretty much anything their minds can imagine (and render in a CAD program). But for all but the most devoted hardware hackers, the current price points — between $800 and $1,000 for 3D printers, around $600 for a CNC machine — are a little too high for comfort.
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Science
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After 225 days in orbit the Air Force’s mysterious X-37B space plane touched down Friday at 1:16 a.m. local time at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base. It was only the second fully automated re-entry and runway landing in the history of space flight. The Soviets achieved the first in 1988 with the robotic prototype of their Buran Space Shuttle clone.
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Health/Nutrition
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It persuaded British department store Harvey Nichols to remove foie gras from its fancy restaurant menu.s
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James Bond star Sir Roger Moore is celebrating after persuading bosses at a British department store to remove foie gras from their fancy restaurant menu.
Harvey Nichols chiefs were urged to take action by the former 007 actor as part of his campaign against the delicacy on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
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Security
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On the Full Disclosure security mailing list, Dan Rosenberg presents a small demo program which craftily combines several security holes to obtain root privileges on Linux systems.
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A single licence for Avast security software has been used by 774,651 people after it went viral on a file-sharing site, according to the company.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab couldn’t manage to blow up a plane over Detroit last Christmas, kicking off a year’s worth of high-profile terror-fails. But that hasn’t stopped the U.S. government from freaking out — putting naked scanners in airports and groping passengers. Overreactions like that compelled one of its senior-most counterterrorism officials yesterday to implore the public not to hand al-Qaeda victories from the jaws of defeat.
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SPIES WORKING FOR THE JUNTA of revolting British colonialists in the Americas have started illegally monitoring credit cards.
According to documents obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act, federal law enforcement agencies have been tracking Americans in real-time using credit cards, loyalty cards and travel reservations. They have done all this without the nicety of getting a court order.
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Similarly, Wired has an article highlighting how Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, is speaking more reasonably about anti-terrorism efforts and security as well, noting (as we have in the past) that “perfect security” is an impossible goal that is, itself, damaging to security.
He points out that the US appears to be playing right into Al Qaeda’s hands by playing up each failed terrorist attempt and then overreacting to it, noting that (like internet trolls), a better response might be to just ignore them publicly, while continuing to do things quietly on the back end to protect the country.
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Reinoehl denied the request, but Allison’s promise to record the proceedings apparently came through loud and clear. Just after he walked through the courthouse door the next day, Allison says Crawford County Circuit Court Judge Kimbara Harrell asked him whether he had a tape recorder in his pocket. He said yes. Harrell then asked him if it was turned on. Allison said it was. Harrell then informed the defendant that he was in violation of the Illinois wiretapping law, which makes it a Class 1 felony to record someone without his consent. “You violated my right to privacy,” the judge said.
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The odds of dying on an airplane as a result of a terrorist hijacking are less than 1 in 25 million — which, for all intents and purposes, is effectively zero — according to Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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A new proposal from the UK government will remove scientists from the advisory council that analyzes and makes recommendations on drug policy, and allow the home secretary to ignore the committee altogether and ban any substance for a year regardless of scientific evidence or advice.
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So the big Thanksgiving airport opt-out opted-in after all. Widespread “regimental” kilt-wearing never materialized. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers were, by and large, spared a plague of True Scotsmen.
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Sometimes you just wonder what folks in our government are thinking half the time. The latest is that Homeland Security, when it’s not busy seizing domains of hip hop blogs, is apparently on a campaign to enlist shoppers at Walmarts in a somewhat creepy attempt to get people to spy on their neighbors. The program is officially called “If You See Something, Say Something” which could be shortened to “Inform on Your Neighbors” if DHS is looking for efficiency.
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Cablegate
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They read like the most extraordinary revelations. Citing the WikiLeaks cables, major Pakistani newspapers this morning carried stories that purported to detail eye-popping American assessments of India’s military and civilian leaders.
According to the reports, US diplomats described senior Indian generals as vain, egotistical and genocidal; they said India’s government is secretly allied with Hindu fundamentalists; and they claimed Indian spies are covertly supporting Islamist militants in Pakistan’s tribal belt and Balochistan.
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Living on a continent with such a chequered history of very repressive governments, I am fully aware of the importance of access to information by the everyday people.
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We may never know the whole story behind the recent publication of sensitive U.S. government documents by the Wikileaks organization, but we certainly can draw some important conclusions from the reaction of so many in government and media.
At its core, the Wikileaks controversy serves as a diversion from the real issue of what our foreign policy should be. But the mainstream media, along with neoconservatives from both political parties, insist on asking the wrong question. When presented with embarrassing disclosures about U.S. spying and meddling, the policy that requires so much spying and meddling is not questioned. Instead, the media focus on how so much sensitive information could have been leaked, or how authorities might prosecute the publishers of such information.
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Days after Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) caused an uproar by warning its students against linking to WikiLeaks or discussing the secret-spilling website’s latest cache of diplomatic cables online, the prestigious training ground for future diplomats has changed tack and embraced free speech.
Last week, the SIPA Office of Career Services sent an e-mail to students saying that an alumnus who works at the U.S. State Department had recommended that current students not tweet or post links to WikiLeaks, which is in the process of releasing 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables — many of them classified — because doing so could hurt their career prospects in government service.
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Glyn Moody points us to a blog post by Brendan Scott that lays out the basic fact that the distributed distribution tools that Wikileaks now relies on were mainly developed in response to constant copyright expansionism at the behest of the US government (on behalf of the entertainment industry).
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As Charles Arthur points out, the Ku Klux Klan’s website points you to a site that takes both MasterCard and Visa — suggesting the pure arbitrariness of both credit card companies’ decision here. It’s a bad idea when firms start making decisions for political reasons. There are all sorts of companies out there that take credit cards to support objectionable (to many) activities. Is it really the credit card companies’ job to pick and choose who they find objectionable to work with — and if so, what basis does it use for saying “KKK is okay, but Wikileaks is not”?
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The world’s biggest pharmaceutical company hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial drug trial involving children with meningitis, according to a leaked US embassy cable.
Pfizer was sued by the Nigerian state and federal authorities, who claimed that children were harmed by a new antibiotic, Trovan, during the trial, which took place in the middle of a meningitis epidemic of unprecedented scale in Kano in the north of Nigeria in 1996.
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Between the federal criminal investigation into Wikileaks, Senator Joe Lieberman’s calls for companies to stop providing support for Wikileaks and his suggestion that the New York Times itself should be criminally investigated, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s recent Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for prosecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and even the suggestion by some that he should be assassinated, a lot of people are scared and confused.
Will I break the law if I host or mirror the US diplomatic cables that have been published by Wikileaks? If I view or download them? If I write a news story based on them? These are just a few of the questions we’ve been getting here at EFF, particularly in light of many US companies’ apparent fear to do any business with Wikileaks (with a few notable exceptions).
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Ever since whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks began its latest round of document releases, it has found opposition and support in various places. It has hopped around from server to server, had its bank account closed, watched as PayPal, Visa and Mastercard all shut down donations to the site, and even had an anonymous group of hackers retaliate in WikiLeaks’ name. One thing that keeps WikiLeaks going, however, is the simple fact that it has hundreds of mirror sites in different languages and locales.
One such listing of these sites hosted on name-in-kind service Wikipedia has been deleted by the collaborative encyclopedia’s editors. Should we cry “Foul!” or is the deletion just more business as usual for the site?
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Sanger is one of the Times reporters who sifted through the leaked WikiLeaks documents and has since written several articles about what the documents reveal about President Obama’s approach to diplomacy with Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, China and other nations.
He explains that the newspaper’s editors and its lawyers had lengthy and deliberate conversations before deciding to publish some of the cables.
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US State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley has called for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to return the leaked US embassy cables, claiming they are “stolen property”.
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Wikileaked is a new foreign policy journal that covers nothing but the stories emerging from Wikileaks’s leaks, including the latest batch of #cablegate leaks.
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Finance
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Oil is at 90 dollars a barrel. The governments of Europe, Japan, and the United States are saturated with debt. House prices in the US are falling again, and there’s no job growth in America. Put it all together, and for some reason, many are still imagining that we’re in an economic recovery.
Today’s horrid jobs report contained some shock value in the sense that it missed expectations. But the novelty of a 39K print misses the larger point that, for a large population like the US, even a print of 100K or 125K would still be very bad news.
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Thanks to tremendous public pressure and the recently-passed Wall Street reform bill, the U.S. Federal Reserve was forced to reveal the details of its emergency bailout of the financial sector for the first time yesterday. From a quick review of the data now available on the Federal Reserve website, we can see that the Fed took an expansive internationalist view of its role, prompting U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to ask: “Has the Federal Reserve Become the Central Bank of the world?”
[...]
Private foreign banks also received billions from the Fed in exchange for mortgage backed securities (MBS). The Fed created its MBS program in November 2008 and eventually paid out $1.25 trillion. These facts were known. What we did not know was that approximately half of these purchases were from overseas financial firms, including billions from Barclays Capital (U.K.), Credit Suisse (Switzerland), Deutsche Bank (Germany), Royal Bank of Scotland (England), UBS (Switzerland) and Nomura Securities (Japan). The numbers are huge. Duetsche Bank sold some $290 billion worth of MBS to the Fed.
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The AFL-CIO pressed lawmakers to extend a “lifeline” to unemployed workers by extending benefits for out-of-work Americans.
The labor group pressed Congress to approve another extension of unemployment benefits by featuring a video depicting jobless workers.
“Congress is debating whether to restore this survival aid,” the video says. “This is not a debate. The choice is clear.”
The unemployment benefits expired Nov. 30 and have lapsed since then. Such a situation has played out several times this year due to legislative wrangling.
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A value-added tax, a soda tax, a gas tax, banning earmarks, freezing a portion of federal spending at “pre-stimulus” levels – there’s no shortage of ideas being thrown out to fix the country’s disastrous balance sheet, which threatens not just near-term economic recovery but the possibility of long-term growth. Like last week’s report from the president’s Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, most of the current plans to fix the country’s finances rely more on increases in revenues than on cuts in spending. In part due to its heavy reliance on revenue hikes, the commission, charged with balancing the budget by 2020, failed to win enough votes of its own members to present its recommendations to Congress.
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Before it began its work eight months ago, one of the main knocks against the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was that it could do no more than recommend changes to Congress. In the end, it could not even do that, falling three votes shy of the 14 needed to officially submit its plan for congressional consideration.
Still, the commission’s report, which was endorsed on Friday by a bipartisan majority of 11 out of its 18 members, is well worth a look. In addition to suggesting some much-needed reforms, including changes to the budget process and simplification of the tax code, it clearly shows, despite its talk of “painful” choices, that eliminating the federal deficit and reining in the national debt does not require radical change. Which is too bad, because even if Congress implemented every cut suggested by the report, the federal government would still be far too big, rife with programs that are unnecessary, unconstitutional, or both.
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For the lucky few on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve sure was sweet.
Nine firms — five of them foreign — were able to borrow between $5.2 billion and $6.2 billion in U.S. government securities, which effectively act like cash on Wall Street, for four-week intervals while paying one-time fees that amounted to the minuscule rate of 0.0078 percent.
That is not a typo.
On 33 separate transactions, the lucky nine were able to borrow billions as part of a crisis-era Fed program that lent the securities, known as Treasuries, for 28-day chunks to the now-18 firms known as primary dealers that are empowered to trade with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The program, called the Term Securities Lending Facility, ensured that the firms had cash on hand to lend, invest and trade.
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I suggest you talk to the Greeks (now in the International Monetary Fund’s emergency ward) or the Portuguese (who are headed in that direction.) For that matter, listen to any policymaker in the European Union – they are all focused on bringing down deficits in a credible manner. And watch the European financial markets – people there are doubting and testing the fiscal credibility of all governments throughout the euro zone.
In fact, try persuading any responsible policy analyst anywhere in the world outside the United States that cutting taxes in the United States from current levels will boost growth so much that the cut will pay for itself” and end up reducing or at least controlling the fiscal deficit (the proposition of the Laffer Curve). You will be met great skepticism.
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Federal rule makers, long the neglected stepchildren of Washington bureaucrats, suddenly find themselves at the center of power as they scramble to work out details of hundreds of sweeping financial and health care regulations that will ultimately affect most Americans.
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Regardless, officials seem increasingly certain that taxpayers will recoup their investment in AIG – an outcome that seemed highly unlikely last year, when the total government commitment to the troubled company peaked at more than $180 billion.
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The news outlets that insisted Congress approve TARP or world will end have been anxiously touting the prospect of repayments and possible profits for the taxpayers from one-time basket cases like Citigroup and AIG. It is worth noting that the question of the government showing a profit or loss on its loans to these companies has little to do with whether the bailout was a net benefit to taxpayers.
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Seven global banking institutions enabled disgraced financier Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme by “creating and offering derivative investment products linked to various Madoff feeder funds,” a court-appointed trustee alleged Wednesday.
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Raising the direst alarm yet, the Obama administration warned fellow Democrats on Wednesday that if they defeat the big tax-cut compromise detested by many liberals, they could jolt the nation back into recession.
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Spending Remains Lower than Pre-Recession Levels State general fund spending is forecast to rise 5.3 percent in fiscal 2011 as 35 states enacted a fiscal 2011 budget with general fund spending levels above those of fiscal 2010. However, declines of 7.3 percent and 3.8 percent in state general fund spending in fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2009 respectively mean that state general fund spending remains nearly $42 billion, or 6.2 percent below its fiscal 2008 level. The fiscal 2010 general fund spending decline of 7.3 percent is the largest decline in state spending in the history of this report. See chart below.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A banquet of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) grossed $1.47 million at the Waldorf-Astoria Nov. 23 with the profits going to oppressed reporters and their families throughout the world.
It is a noble effort supported by many blue chip corporate and media companies. Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony, chaired the banquet. It was held on the first anniversary of the massacre of 57 people, including 32 journalists, in the Philippines. A video commemorated the tragedy.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The first, via Glyn Moody is a long and interesting opinion piece in Pravda, of all places, pointing out the hypocrisy of the US government’s response to Wikileaks and comparing it to the government’s response to the release of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent. It also runs through a nice history of the US’s back-and-forth battle with free speech issues, such as with the Alien & Sedition Acts and the McCarthy era. It also highlights how the Wikileaks’ release shows evidence of the US government covering up all sorts of politically motivated acts.
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The redesigned profile, launched earlier this week and due to be rolled out gradually over coming weeks, is designed to encourage punters to expose even more information about their day to day lives to the dominant social networking site, net security firm Sophos cautions.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Happy Thanksgiving. I’m grateful for your continued support and interest in Internet Cases. It truly is a pleasure to write these posts and to get your feedback and engagement. And it’s also a pleasure to bring you news of this ultra-timely new copyright lawsuit.
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Five advisers have been appointed to Ian Hargreaves’ review into intellectual property growth, the IPO announced yesterday. Two of the choices may cause consternation among creators’ rights representatives.
One is Scottish legal academic James Boyle, founding board member of Creative Commons, and co-author of two rabble-rousing comic books. One portrays Lawrence Lessig as the Statue of Liberty, the other Theft: Musical Borrowing from Plato to Hip-Hop, due to be published next year, portrays copyright holders as totalitarians.
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Looks like someone liked our authentic Ristretto for iPad so much that they decided to copy it. This email was forwarded to us by a customer in Norway. Can any of you translate it for us? Our best guess is that this product is made in somewhere in Asia (not Norway) though we don’t know for certain. Are we mad? Not really. We’re too busy designing the next generation of laptop bags — the copycats will just have to keep up with us.
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The entertainment industry’s newest legal tactic, the “Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act,” (COICA), sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy, has been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. While Senator Ron Wyden exercised his right to place a hold on pending legislation — which will stop the bill from traveling to the Senate floor immediately — proponents of COICA can (and most assuredly will) reintroduce the measure the next time Congress convenes in 2011.
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As you might imagine, I rarely agree with the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) on its positions. While there are plenty of “IP” lawyers who I know well and talk to frequently — many of whom seem to agree with my position on things — it’s no secret that the belief that “IP is all good” and “more IP is better” tends to be a bit more common among such practitioners than the views in the other direction. In fact, if you asked me, I would have just assumed that the AIPLA was 100% behind Viacom in its lawsuit against Youtube/Google. So, consider me quite surprised that the main part of the AIPLA’s amicus brief in Viacom’s appeal of the YouTube case is actually siding with YouTube and saying that Viacom’s argument (as we’ve said) goes way too far.
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Copyrights
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In other words, the music industry today is much less winner-take-all, with the benefits diffused to a larger pool of artists at the expense of the few who did so well under the old system. This is what I mean when I say a good copyright system is one that encourages the broadest-possible engagement in culture: more music, from more musicians, reaching more people, at more price-points, in more formats. It’s a win for free expression and for art, but it’s a loss for some artists and the institutions that supported them.
I don’t celebrate those losses: it’s terrible to think of people who loved and lived for music losing their jobs (most of the people at labels aren’t greedy tools deciding to sue 40,000 music fans; greedy tool-dom is confined to a few powerful decisionmakers). It’s sad to think of the tiny pool of musicians who did so well taking a loss (though before we weep for them too much, remember that yesterday’s winners are well situated to get even richer from merch, performance and licensing, even without the archaic recorded music industry and its shiny bits of plastic).
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This, of course, is pure nonsense. That isn’t the way royalties with modern day recording contracts work. Through the magic of recording label accounting, the average musician makes roughly $23 for every $1000 in music sold — and that’s only if they actually recoup, which is difficult to do, thanks to the way the record labels account for things. For those of you who share my math skills and don’t want to reach for a calculator, that’s barely 2%. Some of that result stems from necessary things the bands may need to spend on: managers, lawyers, taxes. But a good deal of it also comes from neat little, and sometimes recoupable, charges from the record label, things like independent radio promotion, tour support, roughly fifty percent of the music video costs, etc. Other times, the record labels flatout don’t pay the royalties from truly successful albums. Bottom line is, at the end of the day, record labels make money off of selling music, musicians do not.
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In the last few months, there’s been a growing movement by the entertainment industry to blame Google for “piracy.” One of the favorite talking points is the claim that Google is “profiting from piracy,” by linking people to sites that point people to unauthorized infringing copies of content, and then placing ads on those sites. Of course, this ignores the fact that the standard “pirate” out there isn’t exactly the sort of person who goes around clicking on ads either — and is probably a hell of a lot more likely to ignore the ads entirely or use something like Adblock. Either way, it seems like Google has decided to try to end this argument for the industry by announcing some basic changes in how it deals with copyright complaints.
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Michael Geist writes in with new leaks relating to the New Zealand government’s deep skepticism about US pressure to change its copyright law. The US wants New Zealand to add protection for “technical protection measures” (also called TPMs, DRM, or digital locks). This would follow the US law that makes it illegal to jailbreak an iPad, rip a DVD, or move your Kindle or Sony ebooks to competing devices (interestingly, the US copyright office just suspended the restriction on jailbreaking iPhones for three years, having concluded that the US law that’s being pushed in NZ does more harm than good).
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Andrew Crossley, owner of the now infamous anti-piracy lawfirm ACS:Law, has always insisted that he has no fear of taking contested file-sharing cases to court. Now it has emerged that he recently tried to get a court to issue default judgments against individuals who offered no defense, but the hearing failed on so many levels its difficult to know where to start. Nevertheless, we’ll have a go.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is demanding that the newspaper lawsuit factory Righthaven pay the EFF’s costs for its successful defense of the website Democratic Underground from one of Righthaven’s many copyright lawsuits.
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The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has decided to mimic the efforts of its music industry counterpart and put pressure on universities to curb student piracy. The organization notified its partners this week that it would begin sending out letters to college and university presidents in the US “calling their attention” to the anti-infringement provisions of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA). The letter—copied to the campus CIOs—asks universities to cut off infringing students or face potentially crippling consequences.
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Las Vegas-based newspaper copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC is now doing business with Media News Group and has sued a blogger for alleged copyright infringement involving a column from the Media News-owned Denver Post.
An attorney for Righthaven filed the suit Thursday in federal court in Charleston, S.C. This appears to be the first lawsuit Righthaven has filed in a federal court outside of Nevada, where since March it has filed 179 copyright infringement lawsuits.
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